The Routledge International Handbook of Ethnographic Film and Video 2019055678, 2019055679, 9780367185824, 9780429196997

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“This deeply fascinating, incisive and well-edited collection reframes the theoretical, aesthetic, methodological, ethical and social landscape of ethnographic film.These essays come across as both collectively cutting-edge and instant staple references individually - no easy feat for a book that spans geographic and disciplinary boundaries.” – Bradley L. Garrett, University of Sydney, Australia “Comprehensive and engaging, this Handbook is essential reading not just for filmmakers but all ethnographers. From the clarification of the ethnographic film concept, through the presentation of essential approaches and the elaboration of both theoretical and practical tools, these chapters cover the full range of issues with which every ethnographic filmmaker should be familiar.” – Wesley Shrum, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, USA “The contributions in this volume, while firmly rooted in (visual) anthropology, invite to take seriously the entanglements of ethnographic film with political concerns, feminist studies, posthumanism, emotion and affect theories.As such, this book is a refreshing and necessary affirmation of ethnographic film as an interdisciplinary, sensuous and critical field.” – Domitilla Olivieri, Utrecht University, Netherlands

THE ROUTLEDGE INTERNATIONAL HANDBOOK OF ETHNOGRAPHIC FILM AND VIDEO

The Routledge International Handbook of Ethnographic Film and Video is a state-of-the-art book which encompasses the breadth and depth of the field of ethnographic film and video-based research.With more and more researchers turning to film and video as a key element of their projects, and as research video production becomes more practical due to technological advances as well as the growing acceptance of video in everyday life, this critical book supports young researchers looking to develop the skills necessary to produce meaningful ethnographic films and videos, and serves as a comprehensive resource for social scientists looking to better understand and appreciate the unique ways in which film and video can serve as ways of knowing and as tools of knowledge mobilization. Comprised of 31 chapters authored by some of the world’s leading experts in their respective fields, the book’s contributors synthesize existing literature, introduce the historical and conceptual dimensions of the field, illustrate innovative methodologies and techniques, survey traditional and new technologies, reflect on ethics and moral imperatives, outline ways to work with people, objects, and tools, and shape the future agenda of the field.With a particular focus on making ethnographic film and video, as opposed to analyzing or critiquing it, from a variety of methodological approaches and styles, the Handbook provides both a comprehensive introduction and up-to-date survey of the field for a vast variety of audiovisual researchers, such as scholars and students in sociology, anthropology, geography, communication and media studies, education, cultural studies, film studies, visual arts, and related social science and humanities. As such, it will appeal to a multidisciplinary and international audience, and features a dynamic, forward-thinking, innovative, and contemporary focus oriented toward the very latest developments in the field, as well as future possibilities. Phillip Vannini is a Professor in the School of Communication and Culture at Royal Roads University in Victoria, Canada, as well as Canada Research Chair in Public Ethnography. He is the author/editor of 15 books, including recent methodological texts such as Doing Public Ethnography and Non-Representational Methodologies.Vannini’s research interests, typically pursued from an ethnographic approach, span the fields of social and cultural geographies, cultural studies, and sociology.

THE ROUTLEDGE INTERNATIONAL HANDBOOK OF ETHNOGRAPHIC FILM AND VIDEO

Edited by Phillip Vannini

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park,Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 selection and editorial matter, Phillip Vannini; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Phillip Vannini to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names:Vannini, Phillip, editor. Title:The Routledge international handbook of ethnographic film and video / edited by Phillip Vannini. Other titles: International handbook of ethnographic film and video Description:Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2020. | Series: Routledge international handbooks | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019055678 (print) | LCCN 2019055679 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367185824 (hardback) | ISBN 9780429196997 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Motion pictures in ethnology. | Ethnology--Methodology. | Visual anthropology. Classification: LCC GN347 .R68 2020 (print) | LCC GN347 (ebook) | DDC 305.8001–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019055678 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019055679 ISBN: 978-0-367-18582-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-19699-7 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

CONTENTS

List of figures Acknowledgments List of contributors

xi xii xiv

1 Introduction Phillip Vannini

1

PART 1

Practicing the art and science of ethnographic film and video

13

2 Defining ethnographic film P. Kerim Friedman

15

3 Theorizing in/of ethnographic film Jenny Chio

30

4 Filming the Other Stephanie Spray

40

5 The new art of ethnographic filmmaking Christopher Wright

49

6 Beyond ethnographic representation Robert Willim

61

7 From ethnographic media to multimodality Samuel Gerald Collins and Matthew Durington

71

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Contents PART 2

Applying and extending approaches and methodologies

81

8 Ethnomethodological approaches Asta Cekaite

83

9 Oral history, visual ethnography, and the interactive documentary Kathleen M. Ryan and David Staton

95

10 Visual psychological anthropology Robert Lemelson and Annie Tucker

106

11 Video diaries Charlotte Bates

116

12 Feminist and queer approaches Molly Merryman

126

PART 3

Developing genres and styles

135

13 Interactive media Peter Biella

137

14 Sound matters Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier

154

15 Documentary hybrids Lorenzo Ferrarini

164

16 Sensory Vérité Kathy Kasic

173

17 Ethnocinema Anne Harris

183

PART 4

Working with others

193

18 Respect, integrity, trust Paul Wolffram

195

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Contents

19 Participation, reception, consent, and refusal Arjun Shankar

204

20 Collaborative post-production Jasper Chalcraft and Rose Satiko Gitirana Hikiji

214

21 Filming with nonhumans Sarah Abbott

224

PART 5

Working with tools and techniques

235

22 Mobile video methods and wearable cameras Katrina M. Brown and Petra Lackova

237

23 Drones Adam Fish

247

24 360° Video Mark R.Westmoreland

256

25 Screens as film locations Steffen Köhn

267

PART 6

Distributing and circulating

279

26 How to Distribute Your Ethnographic Film Harjant S. Gill

281

27 Circulating ethnographic films in the digital age Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan

293

28 Ethnographic film/video as a graduate thesis Catherine Gough-Brady

302

29 Ethnographic Film Festivals Carlo Cubero

313

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Contents

Conclusion

323

30 Everything you’ve always wanted to ask ethnographic filmmaker but never had a chance to:A roundtable discussion Phillip Vannini, Peter Biella,Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier, Carlo Cubero, Lorenzo Ferrarini, Harjant Gill, Kathy Kasic, Molly Merriman, Mark Westmoreland, and Chris Wright

325

31 Conclusion:The world according to Rouch Paul Stoller

348

Index

355

x

FIGURES

2.1 2.2 5.1 5.2 5.3 8.1 8.2 9.1 9.2 11.1 11.2 13.1 13.2 13.3 13.4 24.1 24.2 25.1 25.2 26.1 26.2 26.3

Karl Heider’s “attribute dimension grid” Sample spider chart Still from El mar la mar Still from Ringtone Warwuyun (worry) Embodied ‘shepherding’ Embodied comforting Twine RacontR Night shot. My eye I’m doing a tidy up Yanomamö Interactive: The Ax Fight Cultures in webs Tajen: Interactive The Maribor Uprisings Amphibious Kaleidoscope Broken Ground—Equirectangular Spatial montage in Positive YouTubers The Jita Memorial Cover art for Mardistan/Macholand Cover art for Sent Away Boys Cover art for Roots of Love

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16 25 54 56 57 90 91 101 102 119 122 139 141 142 144 262 263 270 272 285 286 287

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Sarah Abbott: I am grateful to Michael Marder and Naomi Scheman for notes and insights they contributed to this chapter. Peter Biella: Cengage Learning and Documentary Educational Resources granted permission to reproduce images from Yanomamö Interactive.The use of screens from Cultures in Webs was allowed by Roderick Coover and EastGate Systems. Robert Lemelson gave permission to duplicate the menu from Tajen: Interactive. Maple Rasza permitted use of his images from The Maribor Uprisings. I thank them all. I also thank Marika Alver for her help with Figures 13.3 and 13.4. Arjun Shankar: I would like to thank all of my student-participants, without whom none of this would have been possible. Katrina Brown and Petra Lackova: Sincere thanks go to all the participants who took the time to be part of the study. The research was funded by the Scottish Government’s Rural and Environment Science and Analytical Services Division (RESAS) under Theme 8 “Vibrant Rural Communities” of the Food, Land and People Program (2011–2016). Jasper Chalcraft and Rose Hikiji: This chapter draws on research funded by Fapesp (grants 2016/06840-9, 2016/05318-7 e 2019/09397-7) and CNPq (Rose Satiko Hikiji is a productivity fellow 309705/2016-9). Jenny Chio:Thanks are due to John Alexander, for many hours of thinking through the questions raised in the chapter and for sharing ideas, opinions, and perspectives on the essay film, structural filmmaking, and how to define the documentary. Carlo Cubero: This paper received feedback from Marje Ermel, an anthropologist based at Tallinn University. Her insights associated with attending film festivals and curating sound programs offered valuable critical distance to the theme.The arguments and approaches outlined in this chapter have been informed by my experiences in attending and curating numerous documentary programs in film festivals and anthropology conferences. Pille Runnel, Liivo Niglas, Eva Tolouze, and the entire Maailma Film Festival team have been incredibly generous by allowing me to attend the festival for over ten years and contribute to its proceedings.The Maailma Film Festival’s program and the approach advocated by its curators have been a major influence for me and inform the general argument of this paper. Māris Prombergs approached me in 2013 with the idea of starting an anthropological film festival in Riga at his cinema, Kino Bize. Since we started the annual event the curating team has included Enrico Barone, Ieva Lange, Daniel

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Acknowledgments

Allen, Madara Bunkše, and Marta Kucza.Whatever clarity or insight this chapter has is due to the wonderful colleagues I have.Any inconsistencies are my own. Samuel Collins and Matthew Durington: We wish to thank all of the people and institutions that have supported our multimodal collaborations over the years, especially Towson University, the National Science Foundation, the National Park Service, the Society for Visual Anthropology, community groups in Baltimore, and all of our student participant-researchers. Harjant Gill: Thanks to Alice Apley (Documentary Education Resources) and Jonathan Skurnik (New Day Films) for their input and guidance in developing this essay. Catherine Gough-Brady: Thanks to my supervisors Craig Batty, Leo Berkeley, and Marsha Berry for their feedback and guidance. Also, thanks to my PhD colleagues from “rough titties”: Christine Rogers, Kim Munro, Liz Burke, and Liz Baulch. Paul Stoller: An earlier version of this paper was presented on November 09, 2017 at NYU Paris at the symposium, “Rouch aux USA,” which was part of a French celebration of Jean Rouch. Centennial. Many thanks to Beth Epstein, Faye Ginsberg, and Jaime Berthe for organizing the event. Many thanks for the illuminating contributions of the other participants: Pegi Vail, Bill Rothman, Emilie de Brigard, Paul Henley, Zoe Graham, Sam Iorio, Steve Ungar, Steve Feld, and Christopher Kirkley. Big shout out to Phillip Vannini for graciously inviting me to write the conclusion to this outstanding collection of essays on visual anthropology. Mark Westmoreland: I would like to thank the Center for Innovation at Leiden University for a pilot grant to develop a 360° video learning tool, especially Thomas Ginn,Thomas Hurkxkens, Leontine van Melle, and Jeanine Reutemann for their encouragement and assistance. I am indebted to my two colleagues Sabine Luning and Annet Pauwelussen for sharing their research as guinea pigs for these experiments. A special thanks goes to Zakari Imorana for filming in the mines and Silke van Diemen for organizing the materials and managing the feat of editing these heavy files. Paul Wolffram:This work and the understandings presented in it were made possible due to the hospitality and openness of the people of the Lak linguistic group, Southern New Ireland, Papua New Guinea.They welcomed me into their community and have made me part of their extended family for almost 20 years now. In particular I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Francis Remiduce,Terisa Remiduce, Paul Totili, and George Totili in Rei community. In Siar, I will be forever grateful for the patience and guidance of Patrick Toarbusai, Lenny Torabusai, and my friend Christian Dokon. I would like to make special mention of my wife,Victoria Manning and our two children, Harper and Millie who have always supported my work even when it means enduring many weeks without a husband and father. Any errors or inaccuracies found here are entirely my own. P. Kerim Friedman would like to acknowledge the University of Texas Press for allowing him to reproduce graphic material from Karl Heider’s book Ethnographic Film (copyright 1976, 2006).

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CONTRIBUTORS

Sarah Abbott is associate professor in the Department of Film at the University of Regina, and a Doctor of Social Sciences candidate (ABD) at Royal Roads University. Her doctoral research involves the sentient relationality of trees, public ethnography, and Indigenous research methodologies. She has been a filmmaker for over 20 years, working in documentary, fiction, experimental, and dance genres. Sarah is a recipient of a Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship (2014–2017), the Saskatchewan Lieutenant Governor’s Arts Award for Arts and Learning (2012), and the City of Regina’s Mayor’s Arts and Business Award for Innovation in the Arts (2009). Charlotte Bates is a lecturer at the Cardiff School of Social Sciences. She is interested in developing inventive and sensuous ways of doing sociology, and her research explores the interconnections between the body, everyday life, and place. Her books include Vital Bodies: Living with illness (Policy Press, 2019), Walking Through Social Research co-edited with Alex Rhys-Taylor (Routledge, 2017), and Video Methods: Social Science Research in Motion (Routledge, 2015). Peter Biella is among the early makers of anthropological media—notably the award-winning Yanomamö Interactive with Chagnon and Seaman (1997). He is also the author of Maasai Interactive - a hypermedia work that explores nine hours of audio recordings and 560 photographs. Biella has produced many award-winning anthropological films. He is the director of the Program in Visual Anthropology at San Francisco State University and is past-president of the Society for Visual Anthropology. Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier is assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Victoria where she teaches courses in Visual Anthropology, Sound and Filmmaking. She conducts research on media infrastructure, sound, and digital media consumption and circulation in Cuba. Her book Aerial Imagination in Cuba: Stories from Above the Rooftops (2020) explores the Cuban sky through illustrated vignettes. She directed the film Golden Scars (2010), in part funded by the National Film Board of Canada, about the life and fears of two rappers from Santiago de Cuba, co-directed Guardians of the Night (2018) an atmospheric film about the night in Guantánamo, and Fabrik Funk (2015), an ethno-fiction about funk music in the periphery of São Paulo.

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Contributors

Katrina Myrvang Brown is a senior researcher and filmmaker exploring the practice and experience of more-than-human relations, and methodological ways of engaging them. Her current research seeks to understand how the co-agency of humans and non-animals shapes the workings of formal and informal regulatory mechanisms in addressing land management challenges. It also examines how emotional and sensory experiences of movement through (and with) material environments produce more-than-human health and wellbeing. Katrina and colleagues have developed over many years innovative mobile and visual methods, with a focus on go-along techniques with wearable video cameras. She has used these methods to explore issues of wildlife disturbance, mountain biking, cattle disease, and upland grazing pressure. Asta Cekaite is professor in Child Studies, Linköping University (Sweden). Her research involves interdisciplinary approaches to language, culture and social interaction. She has coauthored Embodied Family Choreography: Practices of Control, Care and Creativity (with M. H. Goodwin, Routledge, 2018). Jasper Chalcraft is a research fellow at the European University Institute (Florence, Italy). His current work focuses on “difficult heritage” in Europe, and on the cultural activism of African migrants to São Paulo, Brazil.As a member of the “Heritage Contact Zone” project, he is directing a series of short documentaries on contested heritage and the cultural inclusion of minorities in Europe. He is co-director of the ethnographic films Woya Hayi Mawe (Where are you going to?), Tabuluja (Wake up), and Afro-Sampas. Jenny Chio is associate professor in the departments of East Asian Languages and Cultures and Anthropology at the University of Southern California.As a cultural anthropologist and ethnographic filmmaker, her research and publications focus on vernacular media practices, tourism and rural development, the politics of ethnicity and cultural heritage, and documentary theory and methods. She served as co-editor of Visual Anthropology Review from 2016 to 2018. Samuel Gerald Collins is an anthropologist at Towson University in Baltimore, Maryland. His research examines the urban as the confluence of people and social media. He is the author of various books, book chapters and articles, among them All Tomorrow's Cultures: Anthropological Engagements with the Future (Berghahn, 2008), Library of Walls (2009) and, along with co-author Matthew Durington, Networked Anthropology (Routledge, 2014). Carlo A. Cubero is associate professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Tallinn University, Estonia, where he lectures and coordinates the Anthropology curriculum. He is also the coordinator for the Audiovisual Ethnography Pathway at Tallinn University. He holds a PhD in Social Anthropology using Visual Media from the University of Manchester, where he specialized in contemporary Caribbean and Visual Anthropology. He has curated film programs for the European Association of Social Anthropology, the International Society of Ethnology and Folklore, the Finnish Anthropological Society, and is the Program Director of the Riga Pasaules Film Festival. His book, Caribbean Island Movements: Culebra’s Transinsularities was published in 2017 by Rowman & Littlefield International. Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan is a senior lecturer in the Department of Anthropology, Goldsmiths, University of London. His audiovisual and written work engages with the ways in which (digital) media consumption, production, and circulation shape understandings of gender, race, and urban space.

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Contributors

Matthew Durington is a visual anthropologist at Towson University near Baltimore, Maryland and President of the Society for Visual Anthropology (2017–2019). He is the author of Networked Anthropology (Routledge) with co-author and collaborator Sam Collins. Lorenzo Ferrarini is a lecturer in Visual Anthropology at the University of Manchester, Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology. His research revolves around ecology, embodiment, and perception among donso hunters in Burkina Faso. His practice as a filmmaker, photographer, and sound recordist experiments with sensory ethnography and the borders between fiction and nonfiction. Recent documentaries include Kalanda—The Knowledge of the Bush (2015) and Living the Weather (2016). Much of his work is available at https://lorenzoferrarini.com Adam Fish is an associate professor and Scientia Fellow in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, School of Arts and Media, at the University of New South Wales. He is a cultural anthropologist, documentary video producer, and interdisciplinary scholar who works across social science, computer engineering, environmental science, and the visual arts. Dr. Fish employs ethnographic, participatory, and creative methods to examine the social, political, and ecological influences of new technologies. He has authored three books including: Hacker States (2020 MIT Press with Luca Follis), about how state hacking impacts democracy; Technoliberalism (2017 Palgrave Macmillan), an ethnography of the politics of internet and television convergence in Hollywood and Silicon Valley; and After the Internet (2017 Polity Press with Ramesh Srinivasan), which reimagines the internet from the perspective of grassroots activists, citizens, and hackers on the margins of political and economic power. He is currently completing a book, Drone Justice, with MIT Press P. Kerim Friedman is an associate professor in the Department of Ethnic Relations and Cultures at National Dong Hwa University in Taiwan. His research explores language revitalization efforts among indigenous Taiwanese, looking at the relationship between language ideology, indigeneity, and political economy.An ethnographic filmmaker, he co-produced the Jean Rouch award-winning documentary, Please Don't Beat Me, Sir! about a street theater troupe from one of India's Denotified and Nomadic Tribes (DNTs). Kerim is also a co-founder of the anthropology blog anthro{dendum} (formerly Savage Minds). Harjant Gill is an associate professor of anthropology at Towson University. His research examines the intersections of media, masculinity, and migration in India. Gill is also an awardwinning filmmaker and has made several ethnographic films that have screened at international film festivals and broadcasted on television channels including BBC, Doordarshan (Indian National TV) and PBS. Funded by the Fulbright-Nehru Award and performaing arts fellowship from the American Instutute of Indian Studies, Gill is currently developing an eightpart immervise virtural reality series on Indian masculinities titled, Tales from Macholand. Gill also serves on the board of directors for the Society for Visual Anthropology (SVA) and co-edits the Multimodal Anthropologies section of American Anthropologist. His website is HarjantGill.com Catherine Gough-Brady is an award-winning producer and director of six Australian Broadcasting Corporation TV documentary series. Catherine created 11 radio features for ABC Radio National. Her work has been funded by various organizations including Film Victoria, Seoul Film Commission, and the Australia Council. Catherine is currently a PhD Candidate at RMIT.

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Contributors

Anne Harris, PhD, is an associate professor and Principal Research Fellow (RMIT University), and an Australian Research Council Future Fellow, researching in the areas of video, performance, gender, and creativity.Anne has authored over 100 articles/chapters and 18 books, and is series editor of Creativity, Education and the Arts (Palgrave Macmillan). See more at Creative Agency Research Lab: www.creativeresearchhub.com. Rose Satiko Gitirana Hikiji is a professor at the Department of Anthropology of the University of São Paulo and vice-coordinator of the Laboratory of Image and Sound in Anthropology. She is author of the books Imagem-violência (2013), A música e o risco (2006), Lá do Leste (2013), coeditor of A experiência da imagem na etnografia (2016), Antropologia e Performance (2013), Escrituras da Imagem (2004) and Imagem-Conhecimento (2009). She is co-director of Afro-Sampas (2020), Woya Hayi Mawe (2018), Tabuluja (2017), Violão-Canção (2016), Fabrik Funk (2015), Art and the Street (2011), among other ethnographic films. Kathy Kasic is a documentary filmmaker and an assistant professor at California State University in Sacramento. She serves on the board of the Ethnografilm Festival in Paris and the editorial board of the Journal of Video Ethnography. Kathy’s films seek to unveil the human relationship with the natural world through vérité, poetic and performative methods. She has screened her work at international festivals, museums, and galleries, and broadcast on BBC, PBS, and National Geographic. Her most recent film, 3600 Feet Beneath the Ice, is a sensory vérité documentary following a group of scientists as they attempt to explore a subglacial lake hidden deep under the ice in Antarctica. Steffen Köhn is a filmmaker, anthropologist and video artist who is equally interested in ethnography as a form of engagement with social worlds and in the practices of experimental film and video art as explorations of perception. He works in both documentary and fiction and further creates more experimental pieces that he shows internationally in galleries and museums Currently, he is a postdoctoral researcher at FU Berlin’s Research Area Visual and Media Anthropology. His monograph Mediating Mobility—Visual Anthropology in the Age of Migration was published by Wallflower/Columbia University Press in 2016. Petra Lackova is a conservation social researcher with an interdisciplinary background in collaborative, mixed methods, and video research on conservation conflicts and land and protected areas management. Previous work includes a video ethnographic study of dog walking to inform Capercaillie conservation in a Scottish National Park, a survey on protecting Scottish wildcats, a collaborative film Grazing on the Edge on common grazings and upland grasslands, or production assistance on National Geographic films on Yellowstone wildlife. She is doing a PhD on using adaptive co-management to mitigate conservation conflicts in a case study of whitetailed eagle reintroduction and sheep farming in Scotland. Robert Lemelson is a cultural anthropologist and ethnographic filmmaker with an MA from the University of Chicago and a PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the founder and director of Elemental Productions, a Los Angeles-based ethnographic documentary film company dedicated to the production of films focusing on the relationship between culture, psychology, and personal experience, particularly in Indonesia. Since its founding in 2007, Lemelson has directed and produced over a dozen ethnographic films. He is also an associate adjunct professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Founder and President of The Foundation for Psychocultural Research, which supports research and training in the social and neurosciences.

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Contributors

Molly Merryman, PhD, is the founding director of Kent State University's Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality and an Associate Professor of Sociology. She is a documentary filmmaker, author, and visual sociologist. Her documentaries explore topics of social inequalities and have screened internationally and been broadcast on cable and regional PBS stations. Her work has received EMMY awards and film festival awards. Her documentaries include Returning to Life (2017), Red Umbrella Rights (2017), Highland Lives (2014), Country Crush (2010), Invisible Struggles: Stories of Northern Segregation (2007), Women Who Flew (1994, with Tom Baumann), and Queens of Columbus: Performance and the Art of Illusion (1992, with Tom Baumann and Andy Gardner). She serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Video Ethnography, the only academic journal of peer-reviewed ethnographic films, the board of the International Visual Sociology Association, and the organizing board of the Ethnografilm Festival in Paris. Kathleen M. Ryan is an associate professor of multimedia storytelling in the Department of Journalism, College of Media Communication and Information, University of Colorado Boulder. She experiments in innovative storytelling practices, including interactive documentary, augmented reality, and immersive storytelling; her research interests include visual communication and oral history. She spent more than 20 years in the journalism industry before getting her PhD in Communication and Society from the University of Oregon. She holds an MA from the University of Southern California (broadcast journalism) and a BA in political science from University of California Santa Barbara. Her other projects include Homefront Heroines:The WAVES of World War II, a feature-length documentary and accompanying website. Arjun Shankar is an incoming Assistant Professor of Culture and Politics in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. His research draws from theories in globalization and development, digital and visual ethnography, critical race theory, and curiosity studies, with a focus on poverty alleviation efforts and the help economy in India. He has published work on race, poverty, and visual regimes in Visual Anthropology Review, American Anthropologist, and Visual Communication Journal. He creates participatory films and has taught in schools and universities in the United States and India. Stephanie Spray is a nonfiction filmmaker, anthropologist, and professor of Critical Media Practices at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her work couples ethnographic methodologies with a critical nonfiction media practice for cinema and art exhibition contexts. Her films have screened at New York, Art of the Real, TIFF, CPH:DOX, Viennale, RIDM, AFI, Rotterdam, Open City Docs, BAFICI, and Anthology Film Archives, and museums such as MoMA, the Whitney, the National Gallery, and Louisiana MoMA. David Staton is an assistant professor of visual journalism and media studies at the University of Northern Colorado. He is a recovering journalist who is drawn to new and emerging storytelling platforms—specifically non-fiction stories. He has acted as producer and writer on the documentary Backstretch, which followed a season in the life of the smallest horse racetrack recognized by the Daily Racing Forum, and Homefront Heroines: The WAVES of World War II. He holds a PhD in Media Studies from the University of Oregon. Paul Stoller is Professor of Anthropology at West Chester University. He has been conducting anthropological research for more than 30 years. His work has resulted in the publication of 15 books, including ethnographies, biographies, memoirs, as well as two novels.An essay,“Blogging Bliss,” appeared in the December 2013 edition of Anthropology Now. In 2014, Dr. Stoller published a book entitled: Yaya's Quest:The Quest for Wellbeing in the World. His work is widely read xviii

Contributors

and recognized. In 1994 he was awarded a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2002, the American Anthropological Association named him the recipient of the Robert B Textor Award for Excellence in Anthropology. On April 24, 2013, Dr. Stoller was awarded the Anders Retzius Gold Medal in Anthropology (given once every three years by the King of Sweden.) He lectures frequently both in the United States and Europe and has appeared on various NPR programs as well as on the National Geographic Television Network. His most recent book (2018) is Adventures in Blogging:Anthropology and Popular Media. Annie Tucker is a senior researcher at Elemental Productions, where she has been working since 2009. She received her PhD in Culture and Performance from UCLA in 2013, where she researched the role of performance in the interpretation and treatment of Autism Spectrum Disorder in Java, Indonesia and developed and taught multiple interdisciplinary courses for UCLA’s Disability Studies Minor.Tucker is also an award-winning literary translator, bringing notable works of Indonesian fiction to English speaking audiences. Mark R. Westmoreland is an associate professor of visual anthropology and coordinator of the Visual Ethnography master’s specialization at Leiden University. He previously served as co-editor of Visual Anthropology Review before co-founding the Writing with Light journal for anthropological photo-essays. His work engages both scholarly and practice-based approaches at the intersection between art, ethnography, and politics. He has written extensively on the interface between sensory embodiment and media aesthetics in ongoing legacies of contentious politics, particularly in Lebanon and Egypt. Robert Willim is a senior lecturer at The Department of Arts and Cultural Sciences at Lund University, with a background in ethnology. He also creates artworks that explore imaginaries and emerging technologies. His art resides in the borderland next to his practices as a scholar of mediated culture.The artworks are used as something he calls art probes.These are used to engender inspiration and material for further research.The works are often based on the development and transmutation of concepts. His research primarily deals with issues of digital and material culture. Since 2018 he works with the project Connected Homes and Distant Infrastructures, which examines the ways emerging technologies are entwined with people’s everyday life and how technological imaginaries unfold. Paul Wolffram is an ethnographer and filmmaker who has worked extensively in the Pacific region. He has worked with Micronesian, Polynesian, and Melanesian communities in Aotearoa/ New Zealand, and throughout the Pacific. His films explore the sound worlds, indigenous narratives, and spirituality of his host communities. Paul Wolffram’s scholarship focuses on ethnographic methodologies and advocates for an embodied and reflexive practice. His recent feature films which have been screened widely in documentary and ethnographic film festivals include Stori Tumbuna—Ancestors’ Tales (2011), Voices of the Land (2014), and What Lies That Way (2017). He is an Associate Professor at Victoria University of Wellington where he leads the production program and the Miramar Creative Centre. Chris Wright originally trained as an artist, producing work in painting, photography, and video. He then worked for several years in independent filmmaking making feature length Super 8 and 16mm films, before becoming the photographic archivist at the Royal Anthropological Institute in 1992. During his time at the RAI, he was awarded a three-year Leverhulme Trust award to return three major collections of nineteenth-century anthropological photographs to their source communities in the southwest USA, Sikkim (Himalayas), and the Solomon xix

Contributors

Islands (south Pacific). He has curated a number of exhibitions, including The Impossible Science of Being at the Photographer’s Gallery, London (combining nineteenth-century anthropological photographs with responses to the archive from contemporary artists and photographers), and Presence at Leighton House west London in 2003. He taught as a visiting tutor in the Anthropology Department at Goldsmiths in the late 1990’s before doing his PhD at University College London and returning to the department as a lecturer in 2002. He continues to work for a local community-based video co-operative where he lives, making films with teenagers, and alongside this he continues to experiment with the practical possibilities of using digital video, sound, and photography within anthropology.

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1 INTRODUCTION Phillip Vannini

A casually dressed man walks into a mid-sized university auditorium packed with students. Most of the students are seated behind their small desks while others are standing, chatting with their classmates.The man makes his way to the podium in the front of the auditorium. He switches on a projector.The students’ murmur begins to quiet down.The camera cuts to the man’s face. He is preoccupied with his thoughts. Perhaps he is focused on the day’s lesson plan.The close-up reveals he is of European descent, and likely in his early 40s.We hear the distinctive sound of a VHS tape inserted into a VCR. The professor quickly walks toward the wall and switches off the room’s lights.The camera cuts to a student’s face staring at the screen. We can see the film’s first images reflected in the student’s spectacles: the film appears to be shot with an old camera shooting in 3×3 format at low resolution, and it is in black and white. The camera turns to the screen. The projected images reveal people in a loincloth, dancing around a fire, with a bush in the background.They seem to be performing some type of a rite.The camera cuts back to the bespectacled student. He appears perplexed. The professor makes a brief eye contact with the student. The scene fades to black. The black screen cross dissolves to the same man. It is an extreme close-up. He now has an unkempt beard. He appears busy and energized, intrigued by something. A wide shot follows. We can see the man is in a small village set in the foreground of a thickly vegetated forest. He is holding a camera, filming what appears to be a small tribe dancing and singing.The dancers are so focused on the performance that they seem entirely unconcerned with him filming them. A medium shot reveals that not too far from him, holding a microphone boom and wearing headphones is a middle-aged woman of Asian descent. She too is observing the performance closely. As the rite goes on the two anthropologists exchange a few glances, wordlessly. They move around the group of chanting and dancing men a few times, sometimes walking closer, and at times walking back. The scene goes on for a minute, then suddenly the chanting stops. Moments of silence follow as the performers are seen whispering to one another. The anthropologists exchange a perplexed look. They seem to be wondering whether to continue filming or to stop. Then two of the performers start walking up to the anthropologists.The anthropologists stop recording.The camera cuts to a medium shot of two men approaching them. They utter a few words in a foreign language.Yellow subtitles reveal what they just said. 1

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“So, can you tell us what exactly ethnographic film is?” The male anthropologist looks flabbergasted. “Well, that is a very complex question,” says the female anthropologist in the same foreign language,“a lot of our colleagues have been disagreeing for a very long time on what ethnographic film is, exactly.” “So, you mean to tell me,” one of the Indigenous interlocutors replies,“that you are not exactly sure that you know what you’re doing?” A close-up of the male anthropologist zooms in on a sweat bead making its way down his forehead. “Well, no, er … we do know,” he stumbles, “but we, huh … it’s a long definition and …” “We have time,” the interlocutor interrupts him. “Why don’t we stop filming and discuss it over a cup of coffee?”The anthropologists agree. The anthropologists and their interlocutors walk toward a hut. Coffee is prepared. A close-up shows steaming liquid poured into a mug.A group of people has now formed. “So, what is the disagreement among your people all about?”An interlocutor asks. “A number of things,” the female anthropologist begins to speak,“but mostly it is about the subject matter, the style, the identity of the makers, and the intended audience.” “So, basically you don’t agree over anything at all,” another interlocutor says with a grin. Awkward silence follows.The anthropologists take prolonged sips from their mugs, as more Indigenous women and children walk toward the group, seemingly interested in joining the conversation. “Well, look, ethnography is basically the study of people’s ways of life. In our language ‘ethno’ stands for people and ‘graphy’ for writing.As filmmakers we don’t necessarily write books, we make films, but they seek to communicate with audiences around the world about people’s different ways of life,” the female anthropologist states. “That’s clear enough. So, what is there to disagree about?” “Details, really,” the male anthropologist answers, “for example my colleague here, Kristin, is a professional filmmaker, not an academic. And me, I am an ethnomusicologist, not quite an anthropologist, so on the basis of that some people might criticize us and say that what we’re doing is not an ethnographic film.” “Are your people that obsessed with detail?” asks a young woman who has joined the conversation. “It’s not that they are obsessive,” replies Kristin,“it’s just that they expect things to be done a certain way.” “So your people are controlling then?” a woman who was earlier seen preparing coffee observes. “Hum … , well,” Kristin hesitates,“what would you say about that, Simon?” “What you may interpret as controlling is actually a form of care,” the male anthropologist explains,“people care for their profession in general so they want to make sure that everybody else in their line of work does things in a specific way. So that everyone is respectful of the canon.” “Controlling, like I said,” the woman concludes with a smirk as she picks up empty mugs and walks off screen. “Maybe we are asking you inopportune questions,” an elderly woman remarks.“In our culture instead of disagreeing again and again over what something is, sometimes we get together as a group and ask everyone what else that thing could be.” 2

Introduction

“Say that again, please?” Kristin asks. “Yes, instead of debating over and over about what a thing is, we talk about the possibilities of that thing, what else it could be, or what it could become. So, for example, your ethnographic film, your work, your art, what else could it be?” The researchers look intrigued by the question. “It could be something that my students are truly excited about, as excited as they are when they go to the movie theater, or even as excited as I am when I make a film,” Simon says with sudden fervor in his words. “Viewers aren’t excited to see your work?” A quick flashback of images in Simon’s mind shows weary-looking students in a classroom. “Not always,” he responds laconically.“I don’t think they get it sometimes.” “For me,” Kristin intervenes,“ethnographic film could be something that families could watch together in their TV room, something … not necessarily on TV but on some kind of library system, some kind of catalog that people could access on their TVs, on demand.” “We don’t have this system that you speak of in our country,” a young man remarks. “Neither do we,” Simon says wistfully,“maybe one day in the future we will.” “What could make more people excited about your films, people other than university students?” an Elder asks. “Well, if it were ever possible I’d love to work with sound recorders and cameras that are nearly as good as those of high-end productions.And not just that, but I’d love to have a small portable helicopter so I could film some scenes from above. And small portable cameras that I could stick everywhere or even give to all of you to wear so I could record what you see, as you dance,” Kristin says with a daydreaming look on her face. “If that were possible,” Simon continues, “it could change what we do dramatically. Instead of us always filming you, you could film yourselves.And together we could make something very unique.This would be very democratic.” The elderly woman in the corner observes: “That’s all very well, but it sounds like a lot of work. I don’t think I would want to have cameras attached to me. I have more important things to do. I have potatoes to grow and children that need my attention.” “Does that mean we would be famous movie stars?” a child interjects. People laugh. “I don’t think so,” answers Kristin,“but if our films could change like that, then their value wouldn’t just be judged in relation to anthropological theory anymore. Ethnographic film could be made for being shared with broader audiences, in many ways. And it might mean that our films could be more useful to you as well.They could be more easily appreciated in your schools and in your villages, they could be used to promote positive change in your communities and your nation, or at the very least they could be shown to your children and grandchildren, and eventually their children.” “And maybe they wouldn’t even need to be ‘films’ necessarily,” Simon remarks, “if we had an easy tool for individuals to watch them alone, on their own, without the need for costly projection systems, they could even be short stories, short fragments, short testimonials that people could watch as individuals and then share with each other quickly.That way every viewer could almost create their own edit, in a way.These clips would be like multiple windows into people’s lives, short glances that don’t require time-consuming amounts of production or post-production, but require the viewer to be active in watching.” “Our village will never have a tool like that,” a young woman observes despondently. “If all of this were possible,” an Elder aks,“would people like you still need to come here to film us?” 3

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Awkward silence follows. The camera cuts to a medium shot of Simon and Kristin exchanging a perplexed look. Fade to black.

*** What our fictitious ethnographers, Simon and Kristin, daydreamed about some 30 years ago has now come true. What was a fantasy back then is now actuality. The definition of ethnographic film, while still contested, has broadened dramatically. Anthropology is no longer the sole proprietor of ethnographic film. Film has become more like video, and video has become filmlike. Recording technologies have advanced to the point that even independent ethnographic filmmakers can compete with professional studios. Drones and point-of-view action cameras— cheap, portable, and incredibly easy to use—can take viewers along journeys previously only available to the imagination. Omnipresent phone cameras have given billions of people around the globe the ability to document their own lives and the agency to tell their own stories. This has now confused roles and identities: the lines between the filmmakers and the filmed are now blurred. Moreover, interactive documentaries have enabled viewers to become actively involved in the consumption of ethnographic knowledge, putting them in the writer’s and editor’s seat. Add to that the fact that mobility patterns—of images, people, goods, and ideas—have destabilized borders and rendered obsolete notions of locality, “exotic” lands, audiences, and what constituted “the field” is now more unclear than ever. And then there is something that Kristin and Simon never quite envisioned 30 years ago (though somehow wished for): an “archive” of on-demand content called the Internet. Either in the form of YouTube and Vimeo, Facebook and Instagram, iTunes or Kanopy, the Documentary Channel or Netflix, a colleague’s blog or your favorite peer-reviewed journal’s website, the Internet has revolutionized not only how ethnographic film and videos are accessed, but why they are made and who they are made for. It is in light of this zeitgeist that this handbook of ethnographic film and video has come to light.This is a handbook for a new world of ethnographic film and video, a collection of original writings intended for a new and remarkably diverse audience spanning across older disciplines and new fields of study, from anthropology, geography, sociology, education, and history to cultural studies, gender studies, environmental studies, media studies, and much more. But more importantly than disciplines or fields this is a handbook primarily intended for an audience who, for the most part, was not even born when the classics of ethnographic film were produced and released. This is an audience who has grown up with the Internet, with HD cameras at their fingertips, and with the ability to travel to no longer so-distant or “exotic” lands with the simple swipe of a credit card or the click of a Skype icon. This is an audience who has become accustomed to living with screens, action cameras, and recorded sound pumped in the earphones for much of their day-to-day life. This is an audience, arguably, who is a lot less interested in diatribes over the value of ethnographic film than it is on actually watching it and enjoying it as much as they enjoyed that sleek doc they just played on Vimeo. In light of the times, this handbook moves on many past and tired debates and parochial arguments over definitional matters. It moves on past the fetishism of the classics. It moves on beyond old hang-ups over style and expression, what ethnographers must and must not do out of fear of rejection. It moves to the point where video researchers and filmmakers have to defend themselves against the accusation that what they are doing is not serious because it is not done in writing. And it moves on past these issues not so much by attempting to come up with definitive answers and winning arguments, but rather by opening our collective arms to a flourishing variety of diverse art and science forms, diverse authors and makers, diverse subjects and collaborators, diverse tools, diverse goals, diverse audiences, diverse production processes and post-production strategies. It simply moves on by keeping on moving: by looking ahead toward 4

Introduction

diversity rather than behind toward conformity. It moves on simply by giving up a collective obsession over what it is, and focusing instead on what it could be next, what it could become today and tomorrow.

How this handbook came to life Books on ethnographic film and video are not numerous, but they do exist. For example, the last few years have seen the publication of a few new methodological books on ethnographic film and video methods, several of which have been written or edited by some of the contributors to this handbook (e.g., see Bates, 2018; Harris, 2016; Jacobs, 2015; Redmon, 2019; Shrum and Scott, 2016). Other recent books have tackled video-based methods in relation to specific disciplinary, methodological, or theoretical concerns ranging from the video analysis of social interaction to the use of observational video in educational settings (Broth, Laurier, and Mondada, 2018; Gubrium, Harper, and Otañez, 2015; Heath, Hindmarsh, and Luff, 2010; Knoblauch et al., 2012; Meager, 2019; Xu et al., 2018). Older monographs also remain quite influential still (e.g., see Barbash and Taylor, 1997; Heider, 2006; Loizos, 1993; MacDougall, 1998, 2006; Ruby, 2000), in spite of the rapid technological advancement in production and distribution of audio-visual material, and in spite of the field’s growing diversity. Moreover new video-based periodical publications—such as the Journal of Video Ethnography, Pluralities, and the Journal of Anthropological Films—and journals that have long dedicated attention to audio-visual research, such as Visual Anthropology and Visual Anthropology Review continue to receive sustained attention. Nevertheless broad, comprehensive reference books on ethnographic film and/or video are not common, and indeed this is the first handbook on the subject ever published. In light of this, in many ways this handbook is not only overdue but also tasked with the formidable challenge of meeting multiple and diverse expectations. There will be advanced practitioners of the art of filmmaking among our readers, there will be scholars who have no interest in releasing their work to theaters around the world, and there will be students who until two weeks ago have never given much thought to using cameras to “collect data” in order to advance theory. Just as likely, there will be readers who do not fret much over the capability of their recording technologies, as well as others who spend most of their their evenings on the Internet shopping for new lenses or learning how to hack into their Digital Single LensReflex cameras (DSLRs) to shoot RAW. In spite of the formidable challenge presented by such a diverse audience this book will attempt to please all of these types with a mix of chapters focused on ontological and epistemological issues, and other chapters focused on tools, practical techniques, and cutting edge technologies. Of course, there are also people for whom this book is not.As an editor I must recognize that I need to make choices that are motivated by a limited word count, and about what is already available on the market and what is not. Because other books already deal with historical issues (Barbash and Taylor, 2008; Bryson, 2002; Engelbrecht, 2007; Griffiths, 2002; Grimshaw, 2009; Grimshaw and Ravetz, 2009; Groo, 2019; Henley, 2010; Lewis, 2003; MacDonald, 2013; Meyers, Rothmnan, and Warren, 2016; Ruby, 1997; Stoller, 1992), readers interested in an analysis of the classics of the genre will be disappointed by this handbook. So too will audiences keen on dissecting the epistemological value of ethnographic film and video in contrast to writing—a topic, I find, that was successfully laid to rest once and for all by Taylor (1996) and should never be examined again. Moreover, this handbook will not please readers interested in film criticism, the semiotics of the moving image, or in the discourse analysis of film (on this subject see for instance Tobing Rony, 1996;Van Dienderen, 2008).As an editor I have also made the decision to focus on contemporary issues (and the future), to avoid tiring debates that are only of interest to 5

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select disciplines, and to emphasize the importance of making (rather than analyzing) film and video. In light of the latter point many contributors have been asked to cover practical issues in clear, practical terms. In addition to drawing upon relevant contemporary literature each contributor was also given the option to present and discuss their own work.This was done in a twofold attempt to provide readers with original intimate reflections and to enable writers to speak from a perspective based on hands-on personal experience. Many of the book’s contributors also happen to be writing about topics they themselves selected on the basis of their interests and their professional judgment of what is timely and relevant in their field. So whereas most handbooks have tables of contents generated by editors and then filled in with individual contributions, 90 percent of this handbook’s topics were chosen by contributors themselves.As a result, unlike handbooks that are squarely focused on detailed literature reviews, this handbook feels more personal, more narrative, and hopefully more driven by passion and enthusiasm because the authors are writing about their own projects. Finally, in addition to a multidisciplinary outlook the handbook is also resolutely international in scope.This speaks to the field’s global (and increasingly hybrid) identity. The last point to address in this overview of the handbook’s making pertains to the dual nature of the subject matter: film and video. As much I would love—as a writer and an editor—to use a single word instead of two every time, I really do believe that film and video are not interchangeable concepts. Film and video are different, yet it is not always clear what the differences are. So, let us attempt to create some order out of this messy situation. Film is a thin strip of plastic or similar material with the property of producing images after exposure to light through a camera. Extremely few people around the world—academic or non-academic—rely on that strip of plastic these days to record images. Film stocks are expensive, hard to find, and more difficult to process than digital video. Film cameras are more challenging to operate than video cameras. In fact, whether based on videotape (though, tape is an absolute rarity these days) or digital image recording processes, video cameras are vastly more common than film cameras. Having said this, more than ethnographic film, ethnographic video would seem to be a more convenient and appropriate label for what audio-visual researchers actually do today.Yet, using the word “video” to refer to both video and film is not ideal. Film, even in the present times, seems to connote something that video doesn’t quite. Film festivals abound, video festivals do not exist. Audio-visual professionals who tell stories for a living are called filmmakers, not video-makers. There are videographers of course, but they seem to be busy shooting journalistic pieces, corporate videos, instructional videos, and even wedding videos—things that filmmakers don’t quite do.Video is something you can shoot with your smartphone, film isn’t. Film is something that tells a story through a defined authorial intention and imprint, video doesn’t necessarily do that. Film is something screened at a cinema, whereas people don’t go to the movie theater to watch a video. Film, unlike video, connotes an artistic work, something ambitious enough to be called such. Video is more democratic, unpretentious, and potentially unfinished and even unfinishable. Regardless of the fact that the tool used to record images may be identical, film and video remain as distinct as filmmakers and videographers, a director and a camera enthusiast, an artist and a maker of videos. Moreover, among ethnographers there are important differences between filmmakers and practitioners of video methods. Filmmakers are keen on reaching vast or targeted audiences through strategic distribution of their audio-visual narratives. Scholars who use video for their research projects may have zero interest in reaching large audiences or any audiences whatsoever—and indeed they may find it even counterproductive or unethical to do so. So while filmmakers will typically give great importance to editing and fine-cutting, video researchers 6

Introduction

may be entirely unable to and uninterested in doing anything with their recordings other than subjecting them to close analysis and publishing stills in a peer-reviewed journal. Firmly rooted in the belief that film and video differentiated thusly are equally useful and valuable for different practitioners and different audiences, this handbook includes contributions pertaining to both audio-visual genres. Common to both, however, is ethnographic intent—the subject of the next section.

Ethnographic intent I want to return to the opening sequence of the treatment which started this introduction. By now you have understood that Simon, our imaginary ethnographic filmmaker is a scholar who, like many of us, is passionate about the audio-visual tradition. Simultaneously, he is also someone who, like many of us, is unsure about the status of his trade. The next scene puts him back in the classroom where it all started.The ethnographic film he was screening is over. Simon turns the auditorium lights back on. He directs his attention to the students. As he speaks to them we learn this was the first ethnographic film he has ever shown to them. “So in what ways do you think an ethnographic film is different from a general documentary?” he asks the students. Several hands go up. “There were very long takes and very wide angles,” a student observes.“There really wasn’t a story,” another one remarks,“at least in the sense of rising dramatic tension followed by resolution.”“Ok, very good, what else?” Simon asks. “It was made by what appears to be an ethnographer,” a third student says, “we can see him in a few scenes taking field notes, so the film is about an exotic place and people who wouldn’t normally get the attention of a typical documentary production.” “Also there is no pre-recorded music, the sound is all … what’s the word … diegetic?” someone from the back of the auditorium hollers. “Yes, it’s very raw. It’s not trying to be pretty to look at or listen to. It seems more like something that could be part of a lecture than something people watch to be entertained,” another student comments.“Also,” she goes on,“it just feels like we are spying on these people, the camera is observing in a pretty detached way and the people in front of it are going about their business as if the camera wasn’t there.” “You have very keen eyes and ears,” Simon tells the students, “and your comments are very insightful. As a matter of fact they are parallel to what many people in the literature say are the key characteristics of ethnographic film. But you are only judging this ethnographic film on the basis of what you saw and heard. There are other films just like this. They are typical of a genre and categories can be used to include but also to exclude. Take for example this definition, which was published in the Dictionary of Film Studies. According to it ethnographic film is a practice of documentary film and of visual anthropology informed by the theories, methods, and vocabulary of the discipline of anthropology, involving use of the film camera as a research tool in documenting whole, or definable parts of, cultures with methodological awareness and precision. In its strictest definition, ethnographic film constitutes a form of academic research, with an intended audience of scholars of anthropology. (Kuhn and Westwell, 2012, p. 143) 7

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If we go by this definition, unless you do anthropology you don’t do ethnographic film.You can see what happens when we confused a category with a whole.You can see where this is going, right? What would happen if I made an ethnographic film that doesn’t fit within that category?” “Well, it would be excluded from that category,” a student says, “it would be dismissed if you claimed it to be an ethnographic film. It would be discarded because it’s different.You would be marginalized because you’re different!” “And what would the danger of that be?” asks Simon.“What happens to any lifeworld when diversity is discouraged in the name of conformity?” Multiple voices shout out different answers simultaneously. “There is no growth,” we hear a voice speak more distinctly. “Kim, what did you say? Can you say that again?” “There is no growth, prof, no possibility of change, of evolution.”

*** I want this handbook to be about growth and change. Diversity is vital to the growth of the field of ethnographic film and video.To ensure diversity we need to rethink not only what constitutes an ethnographic film or video, but what exactly ethnography means. In his chapter in this book Paul Wolffram writes that ethnography is not about a common method or style, but about a shared intent. Ethnography unfolds through respect-based relationships between ethnographers-as-learners and interlocutors-as-teachers. That learning process is shaped by shared trust and integrity. In turn, the knowledge thusly generated is authentic and sincere, Wolffram remarks. The final product of an ethnographer is driven by such authenticity first and foremost, and not by the will to sensationalize, embellish, or partially represent or distort truths to advance one agenda, or one story, over others. And this, to me as an editor, is what truly characterizes all chapters of this handbook, regardless of their writers’ disciplinary background, theoretical orientation, methodological preferences, styles, genres, or media. It does not matter how long you spent in the field. It does not matter who your interlocutors are—people like you or different from you. It does not matter if you did research at home or in a remote field, whether you zoomed in on a small fragment of an experience or zoomed out on a more holistic issue set against a broad context. It does not matter whether you left the camera on a tripod or moved around with it. It does not matter what discipline gave you or your crew a degree. Heck, it doesn’t even matter whether you all have a degree in the first place. And it does not matter whether your work makes an explicit attempt to contribute to a discipline, advance our understanding of a theory, empirical subject, or analytical concept. It does not matter whether you published a booklet or paper in parallel with your video or film, or whether you gave your viewers transparent access to everything you have done. Most of all it does not matter whether you restrained your creativity at the service of a canonical style that stipulates how long your takes should be, what kind of cameras you used, how many close-ups you have, whether you included extra-diegetic sound ot not, whether your shots feel raw and devoid of artistic intent, if your editing respected chronological events or not, if your work tells a complete story or not, how long it is, who distributes it, whether or not it was screened at an ethnographic film festival, or whom it is intended for. What matters, whether it is a feature documentary film or a web video, a short doc or an i-doc, a blockbuster or a series of clips to accompany a journal article, is that as an ethnographic work whatever you did with your camera was done with the intent to learn by building relationships based on respect, trust, integrity, and with the intent to teach audiences sincerely and authentically through an audio-visual medium. 8

Introduction

As an editor, I have tried—with both this introduction and my worldwide search for contributors—to kick the doors wide open to a field that no longer belongs to a single discipline, school of thought, canon, or tradition. It is a field, that of ethnographic film and video, that is more open to change and growth than ever before. A field that now better than ever promotes diversity by encouraging experimentation and innovation. A field that is respectful of its traditions and mindful of the uniqueness of the ethnographic approach among all social scientific methodologies. It is a field that, I hope, will continue to grow fast enough to warrant newer and constantly updated editions of this handbook in the years to come. The remainder of this book is divided into five parts. The parts are ordered in a loose chronological order in the sense of a production process that starts with a reflection on broader and abstract issues pertaining to film and video as ways of knowing. That part is followed by a review of select methodologies in Part 2, and after that, in Part 3, there are chapters providing an overview of common genres and styles. Part 4 of this process focuses on productionrelated issues, such as working with different people, tools, and techniques.The book’s last part focuses on post-production and distribution. The book concludes with a final reflection by Paul Stoller. Paul Stoller was deeply influenced by the work of Jean Rouch, and his thoughts on sensuous ethnography have been foundational to the development of the imagination of ethnographers across many disciplines. Chapters included in each part of the book are preceded by a short editorial overview and commentary, and therefore I do not engage in any kind of summary here. Instead, I want to conclude this unusual introduction (or was it a treatment?) with a brief reflexive note, which I share in hope of inspiring many of the students who will pick up this book to read it and then put it down.Yes, to put the book down and pick up a camera afterward. My story as an ethnographic filmmaker and video ethnographer begins in 2012. I had recently received a grant to research Canadians who lived off the grid and thanks to it I was able to hire a graduate student to travel across the country with me to shoot a documentary—in addition to writing a book and articles. Jonathan Taggart and I had never directed, written, or produced a full-length documentary.And in my own case, I had barely ever used a camera at all, of any kind. But John knew how to get the best out of his Canon 5D and after a few adaptations to my fieldwork routines I felt that I sort of knew what I was doing behind (and occasionally in front of) the camera. Three years later Life Off Grid was released through Vimeo on Demand. Giving it away for free on YouTube, we thought, would imply it had no value.A few weeks later we were contacted by a distributor who offered to pick it up.We had nothing to lose in agreeing to the offer. Our little documentary was soon available on iTunes, Google Play, Amazon, Kanopy, and countless other Video on Demand (VOD) and Subscription Video on Demand (SVOD) platforms around the world. More surprisingly to us it had a worldwide theatrical run through Demand.Film. I distinctly recall one rainy weekend day waiting outside the Rio Theater in Vancouver, queued up together with 400 strangers, waiting to get into the movie theater to watch it. It was one of the most surreal experiences of my career. I share this story not to lionize a little research project or to engage in self-aggrandizing, but as a way of revealing how the entire process of picking up a camera and putting it to work is not as daunting as it may seem. More importantly, it is a process rife with opportunities to learn new skills and to revisit old skills (related to the conduction of fieldwork) from a new and different multi-sensory perspective. And it is not just about skill-building, of course, but a great deal of pleasure and fun too.And more important of all, it is a process that may ultimately result in your research having a greater impact by reaching a new and broader audience comprised of people who would probably never take the time to read your papers or your monographs. So, it 9

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is in this spirit that I have assembled this handbook, in a spirit of curiosity, willingness to learn, hope for growth, and openness to possibility and change, and it is in this spirit that I hope you will read it as well.

References Barbash, I., & Taylor, L. (1997). Cross-cultural filmmaking: A handbook for making documentary and ethnographic films and videos. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Barbash, I., & Taylor, L. (Eds.). (2008). The cinema of Robert Gardner. New York, NY: Bloomsbury. Bates, C. (Ed.). (2018). Video methods: Social science research in motion. London: Routledge. Broth, M., Laurier, E., & Mondada, L. (Eds.). (2018). Studies of video practices: Video at work. London: Routledge. Bryson, I. (2002). Bringing to light:A history of ethnographic filmmaking at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. Melbourne,VIC:Aboriginal Studies Press. Engelbrecht, B. (2007). Memories of the origin of ethnographic film. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Griffiths, A. (2002). Wondrous difference: Cinema, anthropology, and turn-of-the-century visual culture. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Grimshaw,A. (2009). The ethnographer’s eye:Ways of seeing in anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Grimshaw, A., & Ravetz, A. (2009). Observational cinema: Anthropology, film, and the exploration of social life. Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press. Groo, K. (2019). Bad film histories: Ethnography and the early archive. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Gubrium, A., Harper, K., & Otañez, M. (2015). Participatory, visual, and digital research in action. New York, NY: Routledge. Harris, A. (2016). Video as method. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Heath, C., Hindmarsh, J., & Luff, P. (2010). Video in qualitative research.Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. Heider, K. (2006). Ethnographic film (revised ed.).Arlington,TX: University of Texas Press. Henley, P. (2010). The adventures of the real: Jean Rouch and the craft of ethnographic cinema. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Jacobs, J. (2015). Film as research method:A practice-based guide.Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. Knoblauch, H., Schnettler, B., Raab, J., & Soeffner, H. G. (2012). Video analysis: Methodology and methods: Qualitative audiovisual data analysis in sociology. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Kuhn,A., & Westwell, G. (2012). A dictionary of film studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lewis, E. D. (Ed.). (2003). Timothy Asch and ethnographic film. New York, NY: Routledge. Loizos, P. (1993). Innovation in ethnographic film: From innocence to self-consciousness, 1955-1985. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. MacDonald, S. (2013). American ethnographic film and the personal documentary:The Cambridge turn. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. MacDougall, D. (1998). Transcultural cinema. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. MacDougall, D. (2006). The corporeal image: Film, ethnography, and the senses. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Meager, N. (2019). Observational filmmaking for education: Digital video practices for researchers, teachers, and children. New York, NY: Palgrave. Meyers, R., Rothmnan, W., & Warren, C. (Eds.). (2016). Looking with Robert Gardner. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Redmon, D. (2019). Video ethnography. New York, NY: Routledge. Ruby, J. (1997). The cinema of John Marshall. New York, NY: Routledge. Ruby, J. (2000). Picturing culture: Explorations of film and anthropology. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Shrum,W. and Scott, G. (2016). Video ethnography in practice: Planning, shooting, and editing for social analysis. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. Stoller, P. (1992). The cinematic griot:The ethnography of Jean Rouch. Chicago, CA: University of Chicago Press. Taylor, L. (1996). Icononophobia. Transition, 69, 64–88.

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Introduction Tobing Rony, F. (1996). The third eye: Race, cinema, and ethnographic spectacle. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. VanDienderen, A. (2008). Film process as a site of critique: Ethnographic research into the mediated interactions during documentary film productions. Berlin:VDM Verlag Dr. Muller. Xu, L., Aranda, G., Widjaja, W., & Clarke, D. (2018). Video-based research in education: Cross-disciplinaryperspectives. New York, NY: Routledge.

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PART 1

Practicing the art and science of ethnographic film and video

Part 1 Introduction The Routledge International Handbook of Ethnographic Film and Video is divided into six parts. Part 1 focuses on conceptual and theoretical underpinnings surrounding the notion of ethnographic film and video and its historical, conceptual, and theoretical context of production in the twenty-first century. Part 2 contains chapters dealing with various methodological traditions. Part 3 is dedicated to different genres and styles. Part 4 and Part 5 stress out practical issues in dealing with the production of ethnographic film and video, concentrating respectively on working wither others (Part 4), and working with different tools and techniques (Part 5). Chapters in Part 6 pertain to issues of distribution.The book ends with a roundtable discussion with a handful of the contributors to the book, followed by a reflection on the status of ethnographic film by Paul Stoller. The six parts are not meant to be mutually exclusive. There are chapters that could have admittedly fit in Part 2 but ended up in Part 3, for example, and viceversa. After all, the differences between methodology and style can be very minute, and as it often happens with edited books decisions to include chapters in certain parts rather than others respond to practical as much as to abstract matters. Moreover, there is no pretension on my part as an editor to give the reader an exhaustive handbook.There are only 30 chapters and a conclusion in this book, and I am certain that it would take at least twice as many chapters to present a somewhat exhaustive lay of the land.The hope is that future editions of this book can include new chapters that will fill the holes left by this one. Part 1 contains six chapters.We begin with Friedman’s thorough assessment of the definition of ethnographic film.As Friedman himself observes in the opening paragraph of his chapter, the meaning of ethnographic film has changed considerably over the years. Of particular importance to the changing and ever-expanding definition is the fact that audiences have changed just as much as methodological traditions and tools have.While Friedman astutely refuses to generate a categorical definition, his identification of the qualities of ethnographic film enables you to determine for yourself not so much whether a film is ethnographic or not, but rather how intensely so it may be on the basis of your perception of its common qualities. Jenny Chio provides a perfect segue to Friedman’s chapter by prompting us to reflect on the state of ethnographic film in contemporary anthropology and related disciplines. Chio reflects

Practicing the art and science of ethnographic film and video

on the methodological, epistemological, and conceptual relationships linking ethnographic filmmaking and ethnographic theorymaking. In doing so she asks us how ethnographic film can help inform better ethnography (and vice versa) and how ethnographers and ethnographic filmmakers can go about better producing social scientific knowledge and better ethnographic film.Throughout her chapter Chio aims to critique and re-envision the ethnographic potential of film and the filmic potential of ethnography by reflecting on the conventions and commitments of ethnographic filmmaking practice and theory in the present time. In Chapter 4 Stephanie Spray takes on a thorny issue at the roots of all methodologies, genres, and styles that depend on audiovisual methods. In filming Others—that is, in simply pointing a camera at someone—we invariably objectify them. Filming an Other is an inevitably political act, but this does not mean it has to be an unfair or unjust one. Reflecting on the changing relation between the filmmakers and those who are filmed, Chio considers the growing influence of collaborative and democratic approaches brought forward by postcolonial critiques. As she argues, there is indeed a space for ethnographic film to differentiate itself from both its past and from dominant documentary practices.That space relies on the cultivation of a practice that challenges superficial categories of difference while “assuming the practical intelligence and wisdom of diverse ways of being and acting in the world” (Chio, this book). It should be obvious to anyone even quickly browsing this book’s table of contents that most of the contributors are highly sensitive to the aesthetic dimensions of ethnographic filmmaking. This, I believe, is representative of the field as a whole in the second and third decade of the twenty-first century. Ethnographic filmmakers—for the most part—are no longer working under the illusion to produce an objective, unbiased “record” of particular culture that is unconcerned with how it looks and how it sounds. As Christopher Wright argues in Chapter 5, experiments in the art of ethnographic filmmaking are enjoying a Renaissance of sorts, and this has thankfully repositioned ethnographic filmmaking at the forefront—and no longer the margins—of documentary practice as a whole. In thinking of ethnographic film as art,Wright convincingly argues, we allow our work to serve as a powerful medium for connecting those of us who make film, and those whose lifeworlds our films portray. Ethnographic film is a captivating way of engaging with different worlds and as filmmakers it is important that we continue expanding the ways in which we develop its aesthetic qualities and communicative potential. In Chapter 6 Robert Willim takes up Wright’s incitation and pushes the envelope even further.Taking departure from the recent developments in non-representational (or more-thanrepresentational) theories and methodologies that have swept across the social sciences,Willim argues that evolving digital technologies can be pushed to develop films and videos that do more than just portray lifeworlds. Utilizing examples from his own practice,Willim introduces us to what he calls “art probing.”Art probes, he writes, blend artistic practice and fieldwork, aiming to inspire and communicate ideas well beyond the scope of traditional representational practice. Just like many other contributors to this book do,Willim reviews a few practical ways in which he does art probes, so we can try this too. Fittingly, Part 7 ends with a hint to what the future may hold. As they write in the opening sentence of their chapter, “ethnographic film and video in the 21st century is no longer a self-contained linear product available on one medium such as VHS tape, 16mm film, or DVD disc” (Collins and Durington, this book). Rather than fixating ourselves on one medium over another, the present and even more so the future call for a multimodal ethnography whose communication boundaries constantly spill over across different media and the potentials they offer. Probably more than anything else, their chapter suggests, the visual ethnography of the future will be resolutely no longer just visual but transmedia.

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2 DEFINING ETHNOGRAPHIC FILM P. Kerim Friedman

The first time I needed a working definition of ethnographic film was in high school. As a teenager, with only a limited understanding of anthropology or film, I needed a clear set of principles which I could apply to the films I wanted to write about for my senior project. I found just that in the first edition of Karl Heider’s book Ethnographic Film (2006), first published in 1976. In this classic text, Heider treats the “ethnographicness” of a film as a series of 16 attributes, each of which contributed to making a film more ethnographic. He even provided a convenient “attribute dimension grid” (2006, p. 109) which I faithfully copied out and used to evaluate and compare each of the films discussed in my paper (see Figure 2.1). Looking back at Heider’s book after all these years I am struck by how astute it was in creating a framework which avoided a rigid, normative, definition of ethnographic film. Rather than policing which films would or would not be allowed to wear the label “ethnographic,” his approach admitted films which might score high on some features even if they fell short on others. At the same time, however, some of the features he listed might strike the contemporary reader as dated.The emphasis on “‘whole bodies,’ ‘whole people,’ ‘whole interactions,’ and ‘whole acts’” (2006, p. 5), for instance, seems to hail from an era when the discipline of anthropology was still striving for scientific legitimacy. It would be nearly 30 years before I would return to the problem of trying to define ethnographic film.The intervening time had seen massive changes in the discipline.When I began my graduate training at Temple University in the 1990’s, postmodernism, post-structuralism, and post-colonial critique were in the air. The authority and aura of the ethnographer seemed to be a thing of the past (Clifford, 1983).The emphasis seemed to be more on new forms of collaboration (Ruby, 1991), rather than old forms of scientific authority. In such an environment, there seemed little point in trying to rigidly define ethnographic film.True, the first stirrings of a new “sensory” approach to visual anthropology were already beginning to be felt within the discipline but, distracted as I was with my own academic career, it wasn’t until the publication of Sarah Pink’s book in 2009 (Pink, 2009) that I came to fully appreciate these new developments. It was my appointment to the position of programmer for the 2017 Taiwan International Ethnographic Film Festival (TIEFF) that brought me back to the question I had first thought about in high school. As programmer I needed to communicate clearly with filmmakers, producers, distributors, and even our own judges so that they could better understand what kinds of films we were looking for.That first year we received over 1,500 submissions! Even if I had 15

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Figure 2.1 Karl Heider’s “attribute dimension grid.”

never wanted to draw boundaries demarcating what did or didn’t count as an “ethnographic film,” doing so had become a matter of survival. Like Heider, I didn’t want to draw a sharp boundary demarcating the limits of the genre. But I was not satisfied with his unidimensional approach. I felt that it wasn’t just “ethnographicness” that defined the genre, but also things like subject matter and ethics that needed to be accounted for as well. Also, I wanted an approach that would be able to grow as the discipline itself changed. I offer a sketch of this new approach at the end of this paper, but before doing so, it is worth spending some time looking at previous attempts to define ethnographic film. In the next section I examine four frames by which ethnographic film has been defined so far.This is not intended as a comprehensive history, but rather as a brief overview of some of the key movements which shaped my own approach to defining the field.

Four previous frames for defining ethnographic film A full accounting of anthropology’s shifting perspectives on visual ethnography would ideally include the early history of anthropological photography (Collier, Collier, and Hall, 1986; Edwards, 1994; Grimshaw, 2001; Pinney, 2011), as well as new developments emerging from anthropological engagements with new media technologies (Biella, 1993; Collins, Durington, and Gill, 2017; Collins and Durington, 2014). Anna Grimshaw, Christopher Pinney, and others have argued that the early rise of the fieldworker displaced the formerly central role of the camera as “the central validator of the anthropological enterprise” (Pinney, 1992, p. 78), showing just how dependent any definition of visual ethnography depends upon what Grimshaw calls 16

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the anthropological “metaphysic,” or a “set of beliefs by which anthropologists approach the world” (Grimshaw, 2001, p. 7). Even if we just start our narrative from the beginnings of visual anthropology as an independent sub-discipline in the late 1960’s (Ruby, 2001) as I do here, and the rise and proliferation of ethnographic film festivals in subsequent decades (Ruby, 2005, p. 161), there have still been major shifts in the anthropological metaphysic. I have identified four “frames” through which ethnographic film has been defined over the years.While these frames necessarily reflect the shifting metaphysics of the discipline of anthropology and much of social sciences writ large, the small number of people engaged in these debates means that each position is strongly identified with the personalities and biographies of a handful of well-known scholars. I have already mentioned Karl Heider’s work. He is the scholar most closely associated with the first frame, which I call “ethnographic film as record.” Jay Ruby is associated with the second one,“ethnographic film as text.” David MacDougall and Lucien Castaing-Taylor were both instrumental in establishing the third:“ethnographic film as sense impression.” So far, this tripartite approach mirrors what you will find in standard accounts of the field’s development, but here I want to make the case for adding a fourth frame:“ethnographic film as relational practice.” Historically, this fourth frame was developed in parallel to the others but is rarely placed alongside them as a defining element of ethnographic film in this way. Jay Ruby has also had a big impact on the study of image ethics, co-editing two books on the topic (Gross, 2003; Gross, Katz, and Ruby, 1991), but the views presented here owe a lot to the writings of Faye Ginsburg as well, especially her work on Indigenous media.

Ethnographic film as record This first frame defines the primary purpose of ethnographic film as being to “preserve, in the mind of the viewer, the structure of the events it is recording as interpreted by the participants” (Asch, Marshall, and Spier, 1973, p. 179). Heider’s emphasis on “‘whole bodies,’ ‘whole people,’ ‘whole interactions,’ and ‘whole acts’” (2006, p. 5), discussed above, can be explained by this desire to create a record that might be of service to the wider scientific community. Scholars working in this frame emphasized the need to downplay the more cinematic aspects of film that might detract from their value as an ethnographic record. In Heider’s words: “if ethnographic demands conflict with cinematographic demands, ethnography must prevail” (Heider, 2006, p. 3).This frame views film as data or evidence, influenced by anthropological arguments to be sure, but not as constituting an argument on its own.As such, this approach tends to emphasize the importance of providing supplementary texts: It has been traditionally felt that film, the visual image, should be complete in itself. This, unfortunately, has seldom been possible. Filling in information with narration has been tried with varying success, but the more narration a film contains the more guidance it gives the audience, and the less opportunity it gives them to draw their own conclusions from their observations. Karl Heider has proposed one possible solution, the written module, which would accompany the ethnographic film. (Asch, Marshall, and Spier, 1973, p. 183) This view of film as part of the ethnographic record has interesting consequences for how these scholars view films by non-anthropologists. While films by anthropologists might be able to record real world (“whole”) events in such a way that they can become useful to anthropologists as data, all films are themselves records of the cultures that produced them.Thus, as Heider says “even films that show only clouds or lizards have been made by people and therefore say 17

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something about the culture of the individuals who made them and who use them” (Heider, 2006, p. 4). But this poses a problem, because one must then carefully demarcate the boundary between films-as-data, and filming-for-data.The former can be a kind of “naive ethnography” (Heider, 2006, p. 4), while the latter bring the knowledge of the anthropologist to bear on the recording process. While some of the scholars working in this frame might rightly be called naive empiricists, it would be a mistake to view Heider’s own work in this light. He made it clear that the anthropologists who produced these visual texts were themselves culturally embedded, and that the records they produced did not stand on their own. He was always sure to emphasize the importance of putting this observed behavior into its “cultural context,” without which such data could not be properly understood (Heider, 2006, p. 5). Even with such caveats, however, the hope that films could be the basis for further research never really panned out. As Durington and Ruby pointed out,“few publications based upon the analysis of filmed behavior” were ever published (Durington and Ruby, 2011, p. 194).

Ethnographic film as text Jay Ruby’s writing about ethnographic film can sound quite pessimistic, but behind that pessimism lies the heart of an idealist. Ruby would like nothing more than to see ethnographic film elevated to the same position within the field currently held by written ethnographies. If the “ethnographic film as record” frame aims its sights at something more akin to illustration, the “ethnographic film as text” frame championed by Ruby asks us to think seriously about how images might be able to do what texts can do: “an ethnographic film should be […] subjected to the same or analogously rigorous scientific examination and criticism as any other product of anthropology” (Ruby, 1975, p. 104). Sadly, Ruby has become less optimistic over time. Looking back on this claim 30 years later, he stated that he had found “no theoretical discussion within cultural anthropology that includes any contributions from ethnographic film” (2005, p. 161). Nonetheless, Ruby’s efforts to uplift ethnographic film continue to offer important insights into the nature of the medium and its role in the discipline. In 1975, just one year before Heider published his book, Ruby offered his own list of requirements for what would make a film ethnographic: an ethnography must contain the following elements: (1) the major focus of an ethnographic work must be a description of a whole culture or some definable unit of culture; (2) an ethnographic work must be informed by an implicit or explicit theory of culture which causes the statements within the ethnography to be ordered in a particular way; (3) an ethnographic work must contain statements which reveal the methodology of the author; and (4) an ethnographic work must employ a distinctive lexicon—an anthropological argot. (Ruby, 1975, p. 107) Before proceeding, it is worth pointing out that by dividing Ruby and Heider into different frames I necessarily exaggerate the differences and downplay the similarities.The truth is that there was a fair amount of overlap since they were both working within the same larger anthropological metaphysics of the time. Ruby’s calls for “a description of a whole culture,” and a “theory of culture” are very similar to what we find in Heider’s definition. It is in Ruby’s last two requirements that we see their differences more clearly, and I will explore each of these in turn. 18

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I see a direct connection between Ruby’s call for explicit statements of methodology and his writings on “reflexive anthropology” that he would go on to develop in a series of works published over the next few years (Ruby, 1977, 1980, 1981). In those he defines reflexivity, not as the mere presence of self-referentiality (a point missed by many of his critics), but as a means of conveying to the audience the intentionality of the author so that they are able to read into the film no more or less “than what was meant” (Ruby, 1980, p. 157).As he writes, being reflexive means that the producer deliberately, intentionally reveals to his [sic] audience the underlying epistemological assumptions which caused him to formulate a set of questions in a particular way, to seek answers to those questions in a particular way, and finally to present his findings in a particular way. (Ruby, 1980, p. 157) Here we can see what I mean when I called Ruby an idealist.The kind of reflexivity he was calling for required a lot from the filmmaker. First, it requires them to be fully aware of their own assumptions. Second, it requires that they are also aware of the effect of those assumptions on their final product.Third, they must be able to clearly articulate these assumptions in the context of a visual work.And fourth, all of this must be both sufficiently accurate and understandable to the audience in such a way that they can deploy this knowledge to interpret the film while they are viewing it. As Marcus Banks has said, it requires knowing exactly “how much information needs to be revealed and of what type” (Banks, 1992, p. 121). But Lucian Castaing-Taylor has also pointed out that these statements themselves must be understood reflexively, thus falling “into the absurdity of an endless regression” (Taylor, 1996, p. 83). David MacDougall questions the need for such special contrivances since, he argues, “images are inherently reflexive” (MacDougall, 2005, p. 3). By this he means that the image necessarily indexes the moment of creation, and the encounter between the photographer and their subject. He goes on to argue that “these signs are often difficult to interpret individually, but they gain direction and significance through the course of a film.Viewers cannot avoid interpreting these signs, however unconsciously, any more than they can in the exchanges of daily life (MacDougall, 2005, p. 3). The unstated implication of MacDougall’s perspective is that the problem of reflexivity is best solved by training the viewer to be conscious of these signs, rather than relying entirely upon the filmmaker to make everything explicit. Ruby’s fourth requirement is an interesting one.The claim that ethnographic films should have their own specialized language is based on his understanding that this is what “separates written ethnography from other works” and that part of the professional training of anthropologists is a sensitivity to these linguistic codes (Ruby, 1975, p. 107). Here his biggest intervention might be one that gets little notice: his teaching. Former students of Ruby’s can attest to his encyclopedic knowledge of experimental and Avant garde cinema. Indeed, he often incorporated such works into his classes, and at least one Temple graduate has gone on to write about the links between visual anthropology and experimental film (Ramey, 2011). Whereas MacDougall sees Ruby’s self-professed interest in Avant garde cinema as in contradiction to his textualism ( MacDougall, 2005, p. 268), I think this is a misunderstanding of how Ruby saw the link between the two. I would argue that Ruby’s interest in these films is driven precisely by a desire to develop this uniquely anthropological cinematic language and thus complements, rather than contradicts, his textualism. One might argue, however, that it was sensory ethnographers, with their rejection of textualism who did more to develop a uniquely anthropological visual language, albeit one quite different from what Ruby was arguing for. We will turn to them next. 19

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Before we move on, there is one additional element of Ruby’s definition that needs to be discussed.That is his oft-repeated claim that “an ethnographic film” should be “made by a trained ethnographer/anthropologist as a means of conveying anthropological knowledge obtained from field work” (2005, p. 160). Part of any attempt to define ethnographic film as a genre is a desire to establish the discipline of visual anthropology on firm footing, and thus to justify the unique training such programs provide. Ruby is perhaps the most openly transparent of all the scholars discussed here with regard to his desire to not just establish ethnographic film as a genre, but establish a firm footing for visual anthropology as a sub-discipline within anthropology. If ethnographic films are those films made by people with training in the discipline and those people’s training is what allows them to understand the language of those films, we get a virtuous circle that legitimates the genre and the discipline together. It is within such a context that I think we can best understand this requirement. Although, as we shall see, some of the other approaches to the discipline are more interested in breaking down the institutional boundaries between art and anthropology than in building them up.

Ethnographic film as sense impression Where the film as record frame sought to downplay the aesthetic devices of cinema to capture “whole acts,” and the textual frame sought to imbue the visual with the qualities found in written ethnographies, our third frame, ethnographic film as sense impression, rejects the supposed inferiority of image to text. Instead, it emphasizes the unique elements already found in visual communication. In a 1996 paper entitled “Iconophobia,” Lucian Castaing-Taylor decried the logocentrism he found in scholars like Heider and Ruby:“so long as anthropologists continue to hold that language is paradigmatic for anthropology, then a ‘pictorial-visual’ mode of anthropology can only come into being by divesting itself of its distinguishing features. And if that is the case, then why bother?” (Taylor, 1996, p. 85). Castaing-Taylor argued that “film captures something of the lyricism of lived experience” in a way that text cannot (Taylor, 1996, p. 88). One of the most prolific and vocal proponents of this position has been the filmmaker David MacDougall who, like Castaing-Taylor, argued against a logocentric view of visual media. MacDougall feels that logocentrism “neglects many of the ways in which [images] create our knowledge” (MacDougall, 2005, p. 2). MacDougall insists that images can do things which words cannot. He says that this ability of images allows us to reenter the corporeal spaces of our own and others’ lives—the manner in which we all, as social creatures, assimilate forms and textures through our senses, learn things before we understand them, share experiences with others, and move through the varied social environments that surround us. (MacDougall, 2005, p. 270) Reading this I can’t help but think of the ways in which great writers build images through words and wonder whether pictographic images are really that different. Perhaps, rather than creating a sharp binary between text and images we would do better to place them along a continuum. This is precisely what Castaing-Taylor does in his iconophobia article. Drawing on the philosopher Nelson Goodman, he compares the “density” of images and text. In doing so, he acknowledges the ways that film mixes words, sounds, and images “all flowing into and through one another” in such a way that the result “is both dense and differentiated, continuous and discontinuous, all at the same time” (Taylor, 1996, p. 85). Such a view would suggest 20

Defining ethnographic film

that images, because of their density, are better able to do certain things, even if the abilities of language and images overlap.1 This new sensory approach has been tremendously productive for the field as a whole. In addition to the many well-known films made under the aegis of sensory ethnography, including work by Castaing-Taylor and MacDougal, there have been a number of dedicated books on the subject, including: Sarah Pink’s Doing Sensory Ethnography (2009), and Beyond Text?: Critical Practices and Sensory Anthropology (Cox, Irving, and Wright, 2016). Moreover, two of the major centers for training visual ethnographers, The Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard (co-founded by CastaingTaylor), and the Granada Center of Visual Anthropology at Manchester, are closely aligned with this approach.The approach has also helped to open up ethnographic film to the other senses as well, with an increased attention to the aural dimensions of fieldwork, as well as the emergence of purely sonic ethnographies which “do anthropology through sound” (Feld and Brenneis, 2004, p. 461). How to account for the popularity of this approach? For one thing, by valorizing what is unique to visual media, this approach better serves the needs of those who must make a case for their discipline to institutional decision-makers and funding organizations than did approaches that seemed to feel visual media falls short of what written ethnographies can do. But I believe a much more important factor are the changes which have simultaneously taken place in the wider field of anthropology. Changes which strongly resonate with a sensory approach. In Grimshaw’s terms, the metaphysics of anthropology have changed, and so it only makes sense that the definition of ethnographic film would change along with them.These changes are succinctly summarized by Wolff: the turn to ‘affect’, the (re)turn to phenomenology (and post-phenomenology), actornetwork theory in sociology and science studies, theories of the post-human (human/ animal, human/nature, human/technology), theories of materiality, emphasis on the agency of objects, the turn to neuroscience in the humanities and social sciences, and the insistence on ‘presence’ as an unmediated encounter. (Wolff, 2012, p. 4) These changes are sometimes referred to simply as “the ontological turn” in anthropology. While they have a long history, it was at the American Anthropology Association’s annual meeting in Chicago in 2013 that they could be said to have finally taken center stage (Golub, 2013). By emphasizing the senses as “important, necessary, and alternative means of anthropological knowledge and analysis” (Cox et al., 2016, p. 11), the sensory frame has encouraged formal experimentation which has pushed the limits of what counts as visual ethnography. It has opened up a vital space for those who feel frustrated or excluded by more mainstream anthropological ways of knowing valorized by the other two frames. Nor has this experimentation been limited to the movie screen.The Ethnographic Terminalia exhibit which now happens each year alongside the American Anthropology Association is one example of the new kinds of spaces that this frame has helped open up (Brodine et al., 2011). Inspired by Ethnographic Terminalia we did something similar here in Taiwan with Sensefield, an exhibition which ran alongside TIEFF in 2017 (de Seta and Friedman, 2019). Online spaces are opening up new kinds of multimodal interaction as well (Collins et al., 2017).

Ethnographic film as relational practice The three frames discussed above each situate ethnographic film in relation to text.The record frame tries to minimize the language of cinema which it sees as a distortion of the record.The textual frame tries to forge a new cinematic language modeled on textual practices within the 21

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discipline. And the sensory frame rejects textual norms in favor of what it sees as unique about visual media. However, there is a fourth frame that does not primarily position itself in relation to text: the relational frame. I take this term from Faye Ginsburg who articulates it as a critique of the sensory frame. Praising the frame’s “vibrant formal interest in and capacious commitment to the world’s messiness and to cinematic experimentation,” she goes on to say that what all this work neglects to stress, however, is any sense of accountability for the ethical/political relationships that ethnographic and other documentary filmmakers co-construct with the subjects whose lives are central to their films. I think of this relational documentary practice as the fundamental act for visual/audio nonfiction media makers who take seriously the accountability that, ideally, accompanies the privilege of making films about other people’ s lives. (Ginsburg, 2018, p. 42) Ginsburg here focuses on what she terms the “aesthetics of accountability” (Ginsburg, 2018, p. 39), but for my present purposes I want to think of the relational frame in a wider perspective, one which includes research ethics, collaborative documentary, as well as the inclusion within academic spaces (i.e., film festivals, journals, classrooms, etc.) of works by filmmakers from communities that have traditionally been on the other side of the ethnographic lens. This frame has been around as long as the other three, but discussions over relational ethics have generally been separate from discussions over the definition of the genre. Which isn’t to say that the scholars we have been looking at aren’t all deeply concerned with relational questions—they are—but, rather, that these questions are generally not treated as essential for determining what makes a film ethnographic. I think this is because most of these writers focus on written ethnographies as the point of comparison but, as a festival programmer, I am actually more interested in differentiating ethnographic films from other kinds of documentaries than from written texts. I think the unique relational commitments of anthropological fieldworkers, as well as our discipline’s relationships with those who have been the objects of our research, can be useful for thinking about this distinction. Linda Tuhiwai-Smith has written that “from the vantage point of the colonized […] the term ‘research’ is inextricably linked to European imperialism and colonialism” (2013, p. 1). Anthropologists are not insensitive to this critique and have a long history of trying to address it within the discipline. As far back as 1902 Boas shared authorship with his Kwakwaka’wakw collaborator George Hunt, but it is usually the publication of the book Writing Culture (Clifford and Marcus, 1986) that is used to mark the period when such debates came to the forefront of the discipline. But it would be a mistake to think that the debates of this era settled the problem once and for all. Rather, they were just the beginning of a conversation that anthropologists are still having to this day, as can be seen in recent debates about the ethical practices of the journal HAU (West, 2018). Not only does the discipline still struggle to become more diverse (Patterson, Hutchinson, and Goodman, 2008), but the ethical norms of fieldwork continue to be challenged from within as well as without. Jay Ruby’s 1991 “Speaking for, speaking about, speaking with, or speaking alongside—an anthropological and documentary dilemma” is one of the most detailed explorations of the various ways in which documentary and ethnographic filmmakers have tackled the issue of “sharing their authority with the people they film” (1991, p. 62). In his conclusion, however, he warns us not to forget that “In trying to give the subjects’ voice room in their films, documentarians are also attempting to locate a new voice for themselves” (1991, p. 62). According to Richard Bauman and Charles Briggs, this was true even of Boas’s relationship with George 22

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Hunt, mentioned above.They argue that, in making bilingual Hunt a co-author, Boas simultaneously erased some of the other Kwakwaka’wakw voices involved in the creation of this jointly authored text (Bauman and Briggs, 1999, pp. 274–282). To avoid thinking of collaboration as a binary, Ruby draws on Barbara Myerhoff to suggest we need to forge a new style of ethnographic filmmaking that will forge a “a third voice […] an amalgam of the maker’s voice and the voice of the subject, blended in such a manner as to make it impossible to discern which voice dominates the work” (1991, p. 62). Faye Ginsburg’s notion of the “aesthetics of accountability” seems to be arguing for something similar. In either case, I think it is important to emphasize that each ethnographic encounter requires its own collaborative approach, based on the particular context of that encounter (Friedman, 2013, p. 397).An anthropologist working with a media savvy YouTube star will necessarily take a different approach than if they were working with an older informant who never owned a camera. Relational ethics in documentary film are not just confined to the filmmaking process but need to be thought of in terms of “the domain of distribution and dissemination” (Menzies, 2015, p. 111) as well. In this regard, ethnographic film festivals serve an important role, as an important venue for the screening and discussion of films by filmmakers from communities that have traditionally been on the other side of the lens. Faye Ginsburg uses the concept of an optical “parallax” to argue for the importance of bringing ethnographic and Indigenous media in dialogue with each other in order to “expand our sense of the field’s possibilities and revive its contemporary purpose” (Ginsburg, 1995, p. 65). More recently she has drawn on the work of Seneca scholar Michelle Raheja to argue for a view of Indigenous media of “visual sovereignty” (Ginsburg, 2016, p. 583).The sovereignty perspective moves away from narrow disciplinary concerns to emphasize the importance of Indigeneous media in “larger battles over cultural citizenship, racism, sovereignty and land rights, [etc.]” (Ginsburg, 2016, p. 592).

Ethnographic films: a family of resemblances Having laid out the four frames by which we have historically approached the question of defining ethnographic film, I now offer up my own solution to the problem. As a festival programmer, one of my goals has been to create the kind of parallax effect advocated for by Ginsburg, bringing different kinds of films in dialogue with each other. For this reason, sticking to any one of the four frames discussed above would be too limiting.The solution, I believe, can be found in the work of the semiotician and novelist Umberto Eco. In his famous definition of “fascism” Eco (1995) drew on Wittgenstein’s notion of a “language-game” (Wittgenstein, 1973, p. 31) to describe fascism as a loosely bound “family of resemblances” rather than a checklist of features which something must have in order to meet the criteria for being fascist. In a checklist approach, a regime might not be called fascist if it is missing even one feature. For instance, the lack of death camps is often used to silence critics of contemporary political regimes who wish to draw attention to certain fascist tendencies. The family of resemblances approach avoids this by not requiring all features to be shared by any two groups in the set. Wittgenstein thus allows two items to be included in the group even if they share no features in common—as long as they share features with other intermediate elements in the series. Eco asks us to “consider the following sequence”: 1 2 3 4 ABC BCD CDE DEF

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Suppose there is a series of political groups in which group one is characterized by the features ABC, group two by the features BCD, and so on. Group two is similar to group one since they have two features in common; for the same reasons three is similar to two and four is similar to three. Notice that three is also similar to one (they have in common the feature C).The most curious case is presented by four, obviously similar to three and two, but with no feature in common with one. However, owing to the uninterrupted series of decreasing similarities between one and four, there remains, by a sort of illusory transitivity, a family resemblance between four and one (Eco, 1995, p. 5). This approach, when applied to ethnographic films, allows us to explain why seemingly unrelated films are included in the same festival. Like a family where two siblings don’t look related until you see a third sibling that shares some features with each of them, these films might both share some defining features as to what it means to be an ethnographic film without having any two of those features overlap. But when one encounters a third film that shares some features with both of these films, the connection becomes clear. The parallax effect that comes from this more fluid approach allows us to benefit from the different ways each of these films contributes to the discipline, without arbitrarily excluding a film because if failed to meet one of the listed criteria. Insisting on any one defining feature only serves to kick the problem down the road.Whatever this defining feature might be, it too will require a clear definition, and so on. For instance, what does it mean for a filmmaker to be an anthropologist? Do they have to have a PhD? Need their training be in cultural anthropology, or will archaeology do as well? How about someone who has a PhD but never held an academic job? It seems to me that drawing such boundaries does more harm than good. Durington and Ruby call David MacDougall an “autodidact,” who is “lacking any formal training in anthropology” (Durington and Ruby, 2011, p. 201) and yet MacDougall has arguably been one of the most influential scholar-filmmakers in the discipline. It seems clear that if we were to exclude his writing and his films, the field would be much poorer for it.The approach described here, however, would allow us to recognize that having anthropological training is relevant to the discussion we have regarding someone’s films, without having to also exclude all films by someone without such training (assuming their films still satisfied some of the other criteria.) The four frames discussed in the first half of this paper are prescriptive, describing ethnographic films as the authors would like them to be.The record frame rewards films like Wedding Camels (J. MacDougall and MacDougall, 1976) that portray “whole acts,” while the sensory frame prioritizes films like Leviathan (Castaing-Taylor, Paravel, and Neyrat, 2014) that instead give the audience a fragmented and impressionistic experience.The advantage of the family of resemblances approach described here is that it can accommodate both films equally, as well as ethnofictions like Petit a Petit (Rouch, 1971) and Indigenous dramas like Atanarjuat: the Fast Runner (Kunuk, 2001). There is nothing radical about such a position. If you look at visual anthropology film festivals, syllabi, textbooks, and journal articles you will see these films all placed together. But few have tried to articulate a coherent argument as to why that should be. Another advantage of this approach is that it can better accommodate future changes in the anthropological metaphysic, like what we have seen happen with the ontological turn. The family of resemblances approach, however, is still limited to a single dimension of analysis.We can already see this with Heider’s 16 features.This invariably gives the sense of hierarchy, with those films that check off more features seen as somehow being more ethnographic. To avoid that, I’ve instead identified four dimensions of analysis.These should not be confused with the four frames mentioned earlier. I drew my inspiration from each of those frames, but I’ve gone out of my way to avoid the kind of prescriptivism we see there (although my own biases have surely influenced my choices).The four dimensions are disciplinary dialogue, ethnographic 24

Defining ethnographic film

Figure 2.2 Sample spider chart (Clement, 2006).

subjects, ethnographic styles, and methodological norms. I discuss these in the next section, but first I want to make clear these are based entirely on my own impressions, not on an extensive empirical analysis. Nor have I attempted to provide a comprehensive list of the various features in each of these dimensions.The goal here is to point the way toward a different approach to the problem, rather than trying to offer a final and conclusive discussion which would settle the matter once and for all. One way of thinking about this approach would be to envision what is known as a “spider chart” (also known as a “radar chart.”) Such charts are well suited to representing multivariate data such as the four dimensions I have identified (see Figure 2.2). The image provided by such a chart is useful in illustrating what a multidimensional approach might look like, but the problem with such a chart is that it assumes a uniform scale for each film. A better approach would be one that allowed us to have a sliding scale. As a festival programmer I have noticed that I will pay more attention to the stylistic features of a sensory ethnography, and more attention to the ethics of a collaborative project. It isn’t that I don’t look at all the dimensions for each film, but that each film invites being judged in a certain way.This is exactly the kind of inherent reflexivity that MacDougall was talking about, and which I think any festival programmer is sensitive to.

The four dimensions of ethnographic film The four dimensions of ethnographic film sketched out in this section are meant to illustrate how we might get around some of the limitations in each of the four frames which have so far guided our discipline, while still holding on to what has made our discipline unique.The first 25

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dimension, “disciplinary dialog,” does this most explicitly. Although I strongly disagree with Ruby’s attempts to narrow the definition of the field to films made by trained anthropologists, a battle he admits is a “minority opinion” (2005, p. 160), the family of resemblances approach advocated here allows us to value such training without making it an absolute requirement. By framing it as “dialog” with the discipline, rather than solely in terms of credentials, whether or not someone received a PhD, teaches at a university, or merely reads a lot on their own won’t matter.What matters is how well the work itself engages the literature and films produced and valued by the discipline. For instance,Trinh T. Minh-ha’s film Reassemblage (Trinh, 1982) is valuable to us precisely because it engages with ethnographic discourses, even if she herself is not an anthropologist. Similarly,Timothy Asch spent his career collaborating closely with anthropologists, despite not being trained as one himself (Ruby, 2000, p. 115). Of course, not all films that are intended to be in dialogue with anthropology succeed in their task.As Marcus Banks points out, how a work is received by others is a vital part of that dialogue (Banks, 1992, p. 117). For a film to succeed, it needs to do much more than just engage a discipline. It needs to do that well, and it needs to do so in a way that resonates with current disciplinary concerns. A film that was accepted as ethnographic 20 years ago, wouldn’t necessarily be accepted today without significant changes. The second dimension is that of “ethnographic subjects.” Subjects here is meant to have a double meaning: both referring to the topics which are of interest to researchers as well as the people and communities that they study. Perhaps we should more clearly separate out “ethnographic films” from “films of interest to ethnographers” but this approach aims to keep the line somewhat fuzzy. For instance, biographical films about famous anthropologists might not be ethnographic, but would certainly be of interest to audiences at an ethnographic film festival. One such film is Savage Memory (Stuart and Thomson, 2012), in which one of Malinowski’s grandchildren comes to terms with his family’s legacy. Changes within the social sciences have broadened the scope of this dimension considerably.While many scholars in the 1960’s would have recognized John Marshall’s 1962 film A Joking Relationship (Marshall, 1962) as relevant to the discipline of anthropology because it deals with the classic kinship relationship between a woman and her great-uncle, today it seems that nearly any topic under the sun could be considered anthropological. Similar changes have taken place in other social sciences as well.The first and second dimensions thus overlap, since the disciplinary relevance of any particular topic comes from an engagement with that discipline’s literature on the subject. In many cases, the relevance will come from the context of the classroom or festival in which the films are shown. In other cases, ethnography’s colonial history might provide that context, such as with films by members of communities that were previously studied by ethnographers but who now have the means to speak for themselves (see discussion of visual sovereignty above.) The third dimension is that of “ethnographic styles.” There are a wide variety of styles that mark the genre of ethnographic film: observational, reflexive, sensory, etc. While not all of these styles are exclusive to ethnographic film, some films are clearly marked as ethnographic by their stylistic choices. The recent popularity of sensory ethnography may be partially explained by the extent to which it has helped forge a recognizable ethnographic style. As a festival programmer I’ve seen many films trying to copy the aesthetics of Sweetgrass (Barbash and Castaing-Taylor, 2009). In some cases, the use of a particular style might serve as a way of engaging earlier films in dialogue, deliberately referencing the work of Jean Rouch. Hu Tai-li does this in the reflexive opening scene of Voices of Orchid Island (Hu and Li, 1993). Or style might serve as means to critique ethnography, such as in Reassemblage. The concept of style I am deploying here owes a debt to Bill Nichols’ concept of “modes” of documentary 26

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filmmaking (Nichols, 2001), but it is important to note that there might be multiple modes or styles in a single film.This was the case with our film Please Don’t Beat Me, Sir! (Friedman and Talukdar, 2011), which mixed ethnofiction, reflexive discussion, and more traditional documentary styles. Finally, the fourth dimension, “methodological norms,” refers to the manner of production; including both the fieldwork methods which have been at the heart of modern anthropology since Malinowski, as well as the ethnical norms which have developed around both written and visual ethnographies. One of the things that distinguishes ethnographic films from exoticizing TV documentaries is that the filmmakers have often built a long-term relationship with their subjects along with some sense of accountability to those subjects. Guru, a Hijra Family (Colson and Le Dauphinis, 2016) was made by two non-academics, Laurie Colson and Axelle Le Dauphinis, but because their long-term fieldwork and close relationship with their film’s subjects shows through, the film was shown in half a dozen ethnographic or anthropological film festivals, including both TIEFF and the Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI) Film Festival. Films that use collaborative methods inspired by Jean Rouch would also fit within this dimension. The Society for Visual Anthropology’s annual film festival gives out the Jean Rouch Award to honor such films precisely for this reason.

Conclusion In conclusion, I’d like to share the way I defined ethnographic film in the call for films we used for TIEFF 2019. As stated in the introduction, I started thinking about these issues in order to communicate with filmmakers, distributors, and our own festival judges.The multidimensional approach described here is a bit specialized and baroque for such purposes, so I needed to come up with a much simpler version that could be easily understood by a diverse audience.This is what I came up with: TIEFF takes a flexible stance regarding what counts as an ‘ethnographic’ film, including not just works made by anthropologists but also films made by professional filmmakers who display an ethnographic sensibility in their work.That means films which are made in an ethical manner without sensationalizing their subjects. Films that are the product of a long term close collaboration between filmmaker and subject are especially welcome. While we occasionally do accept fiction films, experimental art films, biographies, sports documentaries, and films about musicians, such films will only be considered if they are accompanied by a convincing statement regarding their suitability for the festival.TIEFF is especially proud of its commitment to celebrating the uniqueness and vibrancy of indigenous cultures and has been one of Taiwan’s most important venues for showcasing the work of both local and international indigenous filmmakers. As such we strongly encourage indigenous filmmakers to submit their work to our festival. (Taiwan Association of Visual Ethnography, 2019) What is an ethnographic film? It’s a family of resemblances looking at features spread out over four dimensions of analysis: disciplinary dialogue, ethnographic subjects, ethnographic styles, and methodological norms. But that definition only really becomes important when we need to try to think through border cases or changing norms within the discipline. For the vast majority of cases, something like this paragraph should do the trick. 27

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Note 1 In making this argument I’m inspired by F. Niyi Akinnaso’s writings on orality and literacy, where he similarly argues that oral cultures are able to do many of the things that are usually attributed to literacy (Akinnaso, 1992).

References Akinnaso, F. N. (1992). Schooling, language, and knowledge in literate and nonliterate societies. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 34(1), 68–109. Asch, T., Marshall, J., & Spier, P. (1973). Ethnographic film: Structure and function. Annual Review of Anthropology, 2(1), 179–187. Banks, M. (1992).Which films are the ethnographic films. In P. Crawford & D.Turton (Eds.), Film as ethnography (pp. 116–129). Manchester: Manchester University Press. Barbash, I., & Castaing-Taylor, L. (2009). Sweetgrass [Motion picture]. New York, USA: Cinema Guild. Bauman, R., & Briggs, C. L. (1999). Voices of modernity: Language ideologies and the politics of inequality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Biella, P. (1993). Beyond ethnographic film: Hypermedia and scholarship. In Jack R. Rollwagen (Ed.), Anthropological film and video in the 1990s (pp. 131–176). Brockport, NY:The Institute Press. Brodine, M., Campbell, C., Hennessy, K., McDonald, F. P., Smith,T. L., & Takaragawa, S. (2011). Ethnographic terminalia: An introduction. Visual Anthropology Review, 27(1), 49–51. Castaing-Taylor, L., Paravel,V., & Neyrat, C. (2014). Leviathan [Motion picture]. New York, USA: Cinema Guild. Clement, D. (2006). Spider chart2.jpg [JPG]. Retrieved from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File: Spider_Chart2.jpg Clifford, J. (1983). On ethnographic authority. Representations, 2, 118–146. Clifford, J., & Marcus, G. E. (Eds.). (1986). Writing culture:The poetics and politics of ethnography. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. Collier, J., Collier, M., & Hall, E.T. (1986). Visual anthropology: Photography as a research method. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press. Collins, S. G., & Durington, M. S. (2014). Networked anthropology: A primer for ethnographers. New York and Oxon (UK): Routledge. Collins, S. G., Durington, M., & Gill, H. (2017). Multimodality: An invitation. American Anthropologist, 119(1), 142–146. Colson, L., & Le Dauphin,A. (2016). Guru, a hijra family. Liège, Belgium:Tarantula Belgium. Cox, R., Irving, A., & Wright, C. (Eds.). (2016). Beyond text?: Critical practices and sensory anthropology. Manchester: Manchester University Press. de Seta, G., & Friedman, K. (2019). Sensefield: An exhibition of experimental ethnography. Museum Anthropology Review, 13(1), 96–102. Durington, M., & Ruby, J. (Eds.), (2011). Ethnographic film. In Made to be seen: Perspectives on the history of visual anthropology (pp. 190–208). Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Eco, U. (June 1995). Ur-fascism. The New York Review of Books, pp. 14–15. Edwards, E. (Ed.). (1994). Anthropology and photography, 1860-1920. New Haven, CT:Yale University Press. Feld, S., & Brenneis, D. (2004). Doing anthropology in sound. American Ethnologist, 31(4), 461–474. Friedman, K. P. (2013). Collaboration against ethnography: How colonial history shaped the making of an ethnographic film. Critique of Anthropology, 33(4), 390–411. Friedman, P. K., & Talukdar, S. (2011). Please don’t beat me, sir! [Motion picture]. Shady, New York: Four Nine and a Half Pictures, Inc. Ginsburg, F. (1995). The parallax effect: The impact of aboriginal media on ethnographic film. Visual Anthropology Review, 11(2), 64–76. Ginsburg, F. (2016). Indigenous media from u-matic to youtube: Media sovereignty in the digital age. Sociologia and Antropologia, 6(3), 581–599. Ginsburg, F. (2018). Decolonizing documentary on-screen and off: Sensory ethnography and the aesthetics of accountability. Film Quarterly, 72(1), 39–49. Golub,A. (2013, November 27). Ontology as the major theme of AAA 2013. Retrieved July 23, 2019, from Anthrodendum (formerly Savage Minds) website: https://savageminds.org/2013/11/27/ontology-asthe-major-theme-of-aaa-2013/

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Defining ethnographic film Grimshaw,A. (2001). The ethnographer’s eye:Ways of seeing in anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gross, L., Katz, J. S., & Ruby, J. (Eds.). (1991). Image ethics:The moral rights of subjects in photographs, film, and television. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gross, L. (Ed.). (2003). Image ethics in the digital age. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Heider, K. G. (2006). Ethnographic film (revised ed.).Austin,TX: University of Texas Press. Hu, T. L., & Li, D. (1993). Voices of Orchid Island = [Lanyu guan dian] [Motion picture]. Watertown, MA: Documentary Educational Resources (DER). Kunuk, Z. (2001). Atanarjuat:The fast funner [Motion picture].Toronto: Odeon Films. MacDougall, D. (2005). The corporeal image: Film, ethnography, and the senses. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. MacDougall, J., & MacDougall, D. (1976). The wedding camels [Motion picture]. Berkeley: Berkeley Media. Marshall, J. (1962). A joking relationship [Motion picture]. Watertown, MA: Documentary Educational Resources (DER). Menzies, C. R. (2015). In our grandmothers’ garden: An indigenous approach to collaborative film. In A. Gubrium, K. Harper, & M. Ortanez (Eds.), Participatory visual and digital research in action (pp. 103–114). Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. Nichols, B. (Ed.). (2001).What types of documentary are there? In Introduction to documentary (pp. 99–138). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Patterson, T. C., Hutchinson, J., & Goodman, A. (2008). Minorities in anthropology: 1973 versus 2008, progress or illusion? Anthropology News, 49(4), 23–23. Pink, S. (2009). Doing sensory ethnography. London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi, and Singapore: Sage Publications Ltd. Pinney, C. (1992).The parallel histories of photography and anthropology. In E. Edwards (Eds.), Anthropology and photography, 1860-1920 (pp. 74–95). New Haven, CT:Yale University Press. Pinney, C. (2011). Photography and anthropology. London: Reaktion Books. Ramey, K. (2011). Productive dissonance and sensuous image-making: Visual anthropology and experimental film. In M. Banks & J. Ruby (Eds.), Made to be seen: Perspectives on the history of visual anthropology (pp. 256–287). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Rouch, J. (1971). Petit à petit [Motion picture]. Paris: Les Films de la pléiade. Ruby, J. (1975). Is an ethnographic film a filmic ethnography? Studies in the Anthropology of Visual Communications, 2(2), 103–111. Ruby, J. (1977). The image mirrored: Reflexivity and the documentary film. Journal of the University Film Association, 29(4), 3–11. Ruby, J. (1980). Exposing yourself: Reflexivity, anthropology and film. Semiotica, 30(1–2), 153–179. Ruby, J. (Ed.). (1981). A crack in the mirror: Reflexive perspectives in anthropology. PA: Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Ruby, J. (1991). Speaking for, speaking about, speaking with, or speaking alongside—An anthropological and documentary dilemma. Visual Anthropology Review, 7(2), 50–67. Ruby, J. (2000). Picturing culture: Explorations of film and anthropology. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Ruby, J. (2001).The professionalization of visual anthropology in the united states:The 1960s and 1970s. Visual Anthropology Review, 17(2), 5–12. Ruby, J. (2005).The last 20 years of visual anthropology – A critical review. Visual Studies, 20(2), 159–170. Smith, L.T. (2013). Decolonizing methodologies. London: Zed Books. Stuart, Z., & Thomson, K. (2012). Savage memory [Motion picture]. Los Angeles: Indie Rights. Taiwan Association of Visual Ethnography. (2019, January 2).TIEFF 2019 – Call for films. Retrieved July 25, 2019, from TIEFF website: https://www.tieff.org/en/ Taylor, L. (1996). Iconophobia. Transition, 69, 64–88. Trinh,T. M. (1982). Reassemblage [Motion picture]. New York:Women Make Movies. West, P. (2018, September 26). Introduction: From reciprocity to relationality. Retrieved July 18, 2019, from Hot Spots, Fieldsights website: https://culanth.org/fieldsights/introduction-from-reciprocity-to-relat ionality-west Wittgenstein, L. (1973). Philosophical investigations. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Wolff, J. (2012).After cultural theory:The power of images, the lure of immediacy. Journal of Visual Culture, 11(1), 3–19.

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3 THEORIZING IN/OF ETHNOGRAPHIC FILM Jenny Chio

This chapter is motivated by a series of overly ambitious questions regarding the state of ethnographic film in contemporary anthropology and cognate disciplines. Namely, what are the methodological, epistemological, and conceptual relationships between ethnographic filmmaking and ethnographic theorymaking today? How can ethnographic film help produce, or at least help inform, better ethnography, and vice versa? And, perhaps most importantly, how can ethnographers, filmmakers, and ethnographic filmmakers go about actually doing better at whatever it is that they seek to do (producing social scientific knowledge, film, or some combination thereof )? To build a line of thought and argument between and across these questions, what follows is a necessarily selective yet wide-ranging discussion of recent theorizing in/of ethnographic film. It is punctuated with examples of experiments in ethnographic film- and media-making by filmmaker-artists who are anthropologically trained and/or ethnographically inclined to varying degrees. I open with the relatively familiar debates over the past 40 years on thick or thin description in ethnography, from Geertz (1973) to Taylor (1996) to Jackson (2013), and their relevance (or not) for filmmaking.This is followed by a critical overview of the more conventional, or at least more frequently discussed in anthropological conversations on filmmaking, genres of observational cinema and sensory ethnography. I then turn to works by four filmmaker-artists— Maurizio Boriello, Jennifer Deger, Ben Russell, and Alisi Telegut—as examples that, in diverse ways, offer productive challenges to the “observational-sensory” convention of ethnographic filmmaking and ethnographic film theory dominating anthropological discourse at the moment. Looking at filmmaking practices beyond anthropology allows for a much broader perspective on the experimental possibilities of ethnography and film that have been tested and explored by filmmaker-artists. I conclude by exploring both the formal and theoretical possibilities for ethnographic filmmaking that take up the challenges posed by ethnographic theory and that can contribute to expanding, though by no means abandoning, the “observational-sensory” mode of ethnographic filmmaking. My aim is not to merely describe, and in so doing implicitly reaffirm, the conventions of observational and sensory ethnography in ethnographic filmmaking, yet nor do I wish to throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater. Rather, underlying this chapter is a desire to examine, critique, and re-envision the ethnographic potential of film and the filmic potential of ethnography through an exploration of the conventions and commitments of ethnographic filmmaking practice and theory in the first few decades of the twenty-first century. 30

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Thick or thin The question of the ethnography’s heft and the ostensible benefits of descriptive girth for social analysis and anthropological knowledge production have remained a source of debate and discontent more than 40 years after the publication of Clifford Geertz’s (1973) seminal essay “Thick description: toward an interpretive theory of culture.” Indeed, exactly 40 years after Geertz, John L. Jackson, Jr. (2013) directly took up the question of ethnographic thick-or-thinness and what he dubs an “overconfidence” in anthropology regarding the analytical weight of thick description. In his ethnography of African Hebrew Israelites, Jackson points out that in contemporary ethnographic research, an ethnographer’s purported research “subjects” may also be simultaneously engaged in researching themselves. Moreover, they may be “using some of the very same methods and means that anthropologists employ” (p. 13), including filmmaking and digital recordings and distribution (see also Ginsburg’s important analysis of the “parallax effect” of Aboriginal media on ethnographic film, 1995). Nevertheless, there is, he writes, “an arrogance borne of the powers that ‘thick description’ (one of its most famously borrowed terms) is believed to grant adherents” (p. 13). In privileging thickness as a quality only an ethnographer can achieve, thinness thus becomes situated as “raw and baseline empiricism, the necessary starting point for social investigation but not nearly enough all by itself ” (p. 13). But thick ethnographic description can only pretend to see everything, Jackson argues. “Thick description can be complicit with the more unproductive occultings of anthropological research,” he continues, “especially since seeing through another person’s eyes is not the same thing as actually seeing that person” (p. 15, emphasis added). Jackson’s seemingly straightforward observation that while anthropologists may believe ethnography can “see through” surface, superficial cultural phenomena by way of “thickly” describing them but that this is not the same as actually seeing a specific phenomenon itself (or a person her/himself), speaks to a central point of contention in theorizing ethnographic film. Indeed, film and filmmaking have in many ways become figured as the thinnest straw man of ethnography par excellence. In Lucien Taylor’s essay “Iconophobia” (1996), he traces the ways in which even purported (and well-published) supporters of visual anthropology and the project of filmmaking as part of ethnography have tended to frame and situate their arguments for film within an attempt to “linguify” it (p. 83). Film is simply too thin to withstand the weight and heft of ethnography, or so go the assumptions Taylor seeks to undermine. Of course, underlying these anxieties about what visual imagery, whether film or photography, can or cannot do is the desperate longing for (an) ethnographic film to do what (an) ethnographic essay or monograph is believed to be able to achieve (a point noted in Margaret Mead’s description of anthropology as “a discipline of words,” 1995).“Thick description” remains the purported gold standard. For Taylor, however, rather than demanding a medium to change, the task at hand is to change the very terms used to understand the medium, or as he writes (1996, p. 86),“what if film does not say but show? What if film does not just describe, but depict? What, then, if it offers not only ‘thin descriptions’ but also ‘thick depictions’?” Taking these two perspectives into consideration, Jackson’s critique of the valorization of thick description in anthropology writ large thus extends Taylor’s arguments against the logocentricism, and therefore iconophobia, of the discipline. And yet, persistent anxieties over the dangers of being too thin, and the imagined riches (of knowledge) stored in being thick, continue to bubble up, as illustrated in a 2014 multi-authored discussion on theory in visual anthropology (Hockings et al., 2014). David MacDougall, who has written at length on the relationship between words and images in film, photography, and ethnography (1998 and 2005), succinctly categorizes theory in visual anthropology in three general spheres: the ontological, the methodo31

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logical, and the epistemological (in Hockings et al., 2014, p. 444). Rather than insisting upon the irreconcilable differences between these theoretical orientations, the challenge for ethnographic film (as a practice within visual anthropology) is to find ways to integrate these theoretical frameworks. But resistance to doing so remains, as evidenced in the contributions by Hockings, Tomaselli, and Williams, who each maintain a rather sharp divide between the visual as method and ethnography as theory. For example, Hockings insists that “with all the will in the world, theory cannot be applied directly to an explanation of visible cultural phenomenon. Rather theory is brought to bear on some description of the event” (Hockings et al., 2014, p. 440, emphasis added). Again, thick “theoretical” description is positioned as the goal, although as Carta (in Hockings et al., 2014, p. 454) notes in his commentary,“film images are both observations of the world and representations of subjective mental phenomena. As such, they give us something of what is left out of any description of the world in purely third-person terms.” Like Jackson’s reminder that seeing through someone’s eyes is not the same as actually seeing someone, theorizing the visual in anthropology (and in the practice of filmmaking) can and should be what Carta dubs a “subversive empirical practice in which all means of knowing are legitimate” (in Hockings et al., 2014, p. 453). Moreover, in a set of rejoinder commentaries published the following year, Silverstein (in Piault, Silverstein, and Graham, 2015, p. 174) insightfully identifies the gendered dimension of much of the resistance to theorizing the visual in anthropology, as “theory” (ethnographic thick description) becomes marked as abstraction and sophistication (and the domain of the masculine), while “method” (film or other thin things) is characterized as emotive, responsive, and (merely) reflexive (and by extension, feminine). Yet even in the midst of this tug-of-war between thick and thin, and the hand-wringing between theory and method, ethnographic film as a practice has not vanished, let alone slowed. Within anthropology two related aesthetic modes or genres of filmmaking have especially come to prevail as the dominant conventions of what “looks like” or constitutes a visual representation of ethnographic fieldwork and knowledge: observational cinema (see Olivieri, this book) and the filmic version of sensory ethnography (see Kasic, this book). Efforts to theorize both forms have raised the stakes for ethnographic filmmaking, giving much-needed weight to the arguments by Jackson, Taylor, and Carta discussed so far. But the wide-scale disciplinary adoption and celebration of observational cinema and sensory ethnography as the new “thick description” of ethnographic filmmaking have also precluded and diverted attention from more critical, experimental, and radical ways of thinking, making, and theorizing. Indeed, ethnography and the ethnographic have become arguably more and more valuable and desirable in filmmaking and art practices beyond anthropology (see, for example, Foster, 1995; Cox, Irving, and Wright, 2016; Schneider and Pasqualino, 2014). Taken together, as I explore in the following section, the conventions of the “observational-sensory” mode of ethnographic filmmaking should be considered as a foundation upon which to examine and experiment with the possibilities of film and ethnography.

“Observational-sensory” filmmaking as convention To consider observational cinema and sensory ethnography filmmaking as conventional, and to situate them along a continuum, or more accurately as kin-related brethren within a genealogy of ethnographic filmmaking aesthetic genres, is neither radical nor an attempt to diminish the value of either (cf. Landesman, 2015; Leimbacher, 2014; Pavsek, 2015; and Westmoreland and Luvaas, 2015).The importance of attending to observational cinema and sensory ethnography in relation to each other, and within larger debates in theorizing ethnography and film, lies in understanding the dominant conventions of ethnographic film in the twenty-first century and 32

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the ongoing commitments of both filmmakers and ethnographers. In light of this, I illustrate in what follows how the “observational-sensory” convention now constitutes a terrain upon which new experiments, and new insights, in ethnographic filmmaking have emerged. As a mode of documentary, observational cinema emphasizes unassuming, modest, and painstakingly detailed depictions of humanity and the everyday, in contrast to the idea of cinema as spectacle (Grimshaw and Ravetz, 2009, pp. 3–7; also see Olivieri, this book). For ethnographic filmmakers, this has meant carefully attending to the “texture of lived experience” rather than privileging “the more muscular or herculean endeavors of theory, Marxism, or interpretation” (pp. 7–8). Tying observational cinema more directly to ethnographic research, Grimshaw and Ravetz (2009) make an important intervention in conceptualizing the act of observation, which itself is fundamental to the commonplace understanding of ethnographic fieldwork as “participant-observation.” Observation, they note, is both a skilled practice, or in other words “an active and disciplined engagement with the world” (p. 11), and it can be deployed as an observational sensibility (p. 5). An observational sensibility is rooted, fundamentally, in the relationship between the observer and the observed, and as such, observational cinema is also, they write,“a reflexive praxis, a way of doing anthropology that has the potential to creatively fuse the object and medium of inquiry” (p. 136). Jackson’s argument for thin ethnography thus echoes Grimshaw and Ravetz here, and like Carta’s argument for film as a “subversive empirical practice,” Grimshaw and Ravetz stress “the radical nature of the observational project for anthropology” precisely because attention to the theoretical implications of observation reveals and reshapes disciplinary understandings of power and forms of speaking and knowing (pp. 161–162). In turn, they propose that observational cinema be considered an example of phenomenological anthropology, with a focus on lived experience and “the irreducibility of subjects in the world” (pp. 136, 161–162). Aesthetic and stylistic modes developed in observational cinema, such as the long take and an eschewal of interviews or voice-over narration, thus come to embody a particular relationship between the filmmaker and both the profilmic world as well as the film audience, each of whom is asked and expected to engage with the humanity of the other. As observational cinema became a dominant mode of ethnographic filmmaking, the filmic genre of sensory ethnography was institutionalized through the establishment of the Sensory Ethnography Lab (SEL) at Harvard University under the direction of Lucien Castaing-Taylor (see Kasic, this book). Like observational cinema, the connection between SEL and phenomenology (and phenomenological anthropology) is clear, not only in Castaing-Taylor’s earlier arguments on iconophobia and the need for “thick depiction,” but also in the very construction of the brand-name.As Irina Leimbacher writes (2014), The choice of SEL’s name falls within the lineage of a current in written anthropological scholarship that emerged in the late Eighties and Nineties.These methodological approaches as defined by different anthropologists—Paul Stoller’s ‘sensuous scholarship,’ Michael Jackson’s ‘radical empiricism,’ and Robert Desjarlais’s “knowing through the body”—each insist on the crucial role of the body and the senses, the visceral and the palpable, in any engagement with and representation of the world (n.p.). In many ways, observational cinema and sensory ethnography share a set of commitments to a particular mode of engagement with the world that privileges phenomena as seen by and through the camera. The similarities between observational cinema and sensory ethnography filmmaking are both aesthetic and theoretical—extended long takes, avoidance of voice-over or interviews, and the primacy of painstaking detail on the film subject—and both, as derivations 33

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of an observational documentary tradition, as Suhr and Willerslev have argued (2012, p. 285), are “preoccupied” with a Bazinian “cinema of duration.” Nevertheless, the question remains of whether or not the long take really resembles ordinary vision or rather an egocentric, and “overconfident” (to use Jackson’s term), ethnographic filmmaking perspective (Suhr and Willerslev, 2012, p. 287). For Suhr and Willerslev, “this [critique] is not to suggest that observational cinema never considers the otherness of others, but that it does so in terms of a subject-centered perspectives, which only allows for an otherness that the filmmaker and audience are already prepared for” (2012, p. 292). They argue for greater attention to, and use of, montage to draw attention to the invisibilities of the human visual experience, to make visible the simple fact that what is seen through the camera is never a direct (re)presentation of what is seen. In this regard, there are two differences between observational cinema and sensory ethnographic filmmaking worth noting. As the latter became conventionalized by films emerging from SEL, and particularly the films co-directed by Castaing-Taylor (namely Sweetgrass (2009) with Ilisa Barbash, and Leviathan (2013) with Véréna Paravel), the first distinction of note is that “sensory ethnography” extends the humanity of observational cinema to consider non-human lives and lived experiences as the “observed other.” The second difference has been greater attention to auditory experience, which still relies on ambient and sync sound but is layered and edited to create greater tension between the images and sound, and distance and closeness. MacDonald, in his 2013 chapter on Castaing-Taylor and sensory ethnography, analyzes the work of Castaing-Taylor in terms of grappling with the problem that too much was expected of cinema, an anxiety exemplified in the thick-or-thin debates and the search for theory in visual anthropology discussed earlier.And so while Sweetgrass was shot in a classic observational documentary manner, MacDonald writes, its commitment to sound and to the long take constructs, or at the very least is suggestive of, a lateral/horizontal relationship between subjects (the sheep, their caretakers, the filmmaker, and the audience; see also Castaing-Taylor, 2016). Leviathan arguably cemented “SEL” as both a recognized name with a recognizable aesthetic. But Pavsek, Landesman, and other contributors to a 2015 special journal issue devoted to the film tempered the celebratory reception of the film by calling into question how and if “sensory ethnography” is enough, cinematically and ethically, to address the anxieties of the past particularly in relation to ethnography and its commitments. Landesman (2015) states unequivocally that “one should think about Leviathan not necessarily through a discourse of rupture that accounts for its total newness, but rather in terms of the continuities that it forms with the observational approach that has long dominated ethnographic filmmaking practices” (p. 17). Doing so, Landesman continues, allows for “developing new ways for participation and experimentation in ethnographic encounters in film” (p. 18). In other words, by understanding Leviathan within a broader context of ethnographic film aesthetics and theory, the possibilities of observation, filmmaking, and ethnography become more apparent and more vibrant.These potentialities are rooted in a shared emphasis on lived experience, an attentiveness to detail, and the ethics of the encounter which have informed ethnographic experimentation widely, well beyond what has been conventionalized as observational cinema or sensory ethnography filmmaking (see also Cox, Irving, and Wright, 2016).

Four experiments If, as argued, “observational-sensory” filmmaking constitutes the current dominant convention in ethnographic film, what other forms, genres, modes, and aesthetics might help expand the practice and its theorization? The four works and filmmakers described below each occupy a different position, or relation, to ethnography and film. I highlight these particular works and 34

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filmmakers out of a sense of pragmatism, to a large degree, in that the films I discuss are available online (Boriello, Russell, and Telegut) or as an extended feature of an edited book (Deger, 2016), so that readers of this handbook can access and analyze each for themselves.Two of the filmmakers, Jennifer Deger and Maurizio Boriello, hold doctorates in anthropology and have worked, in varying capacities, within academic anthropology as teachers and researchers.The other two, Ben Russell and Alisi Telegut, are artist-filmmakers whose works have been described as “psychedelic ethnography” (Russell) and as contributions to “ethnocultural” research (Telegut). In this way, these four filmmakers and the works discussed below, offer a dynamic, yet inter-connected, perspective on emergent forms and aesthetics of ethnographic filmmaking. Jennifer Deger’s short video, Christmas with Wawa (2016), is accompanied by an essay detailing how the work was “an attempt to make a film with Yolgnu aesthetics, rather than a documentary about them” (p. 164). As a filmmaker-artist-anthropologist with deep ties to Yolgnu community in northern Australia, Deger is perhaps most well known for her collaborative experimental media projects through the collective Miyarrka Media, which she co-founded, as well as her written ethnography of Yolgnu media-making and aesthetics (2006). As the sole director of Christmas with Wawa, however, this video departs from Deger’s collaborative mode of experimental filmmaking. Critically challenging her own positionality as director, ethnographer, friend, and collaborator, she writes,“As I film and edit, I assume the position as both a feelingful and a knowing subject claiming and affirming my relationships through aesthetic elaboration” (p. 167).The worry remains, however, of turning to the aesthetic at the expense of the political and the ethical—concerns raised directly by Pavsek (2015) in his critique of Leviathan—and the video itself moves between still photographs, gently pulsing holiday lights, shining tinsel, and everyday acts of decoration and family life, refusing an obvious “subject,” narrative coherence, or visual focus. The only constant is the soundtrack: Mariah Carey’s holiday hit, All I want for Christmas is you. In her essay, Deger describes her video as a form of “participant imagining,” made possible by the giving as well as receiving within all filmmaking practices (even those that claim to be experimental), and keeping central the relations of power enacted by recording and viewing technologies (p. 168). What makes Christmas with Wawa new and remarkable, in light of “observational-sensory” conventions, is the way in which Deger’s critical self-reflexivity about the film leads to an experimental work that is able to foreground a filmic understanding, an elaboration, of Yolgnu aesthetics and Yolgnu Christmas that neither relies entirely upon her “standing in” for the viewer (to “explain” what is shown) nor defaults into a total aesthetic experience that avoids or overlooks cultural context and specificity. Faber navalis (2016), by maritime anthropologist-filmmaker and boatbuilder Maurizio Boriello, makes its ostensible subject clear from the start: the restoration of a wooden ship. The editing and audio-visual aesthetic of the film are, in many ways, quite similar to “sensory ethnography” films, with extensive use of ambient sound, virtually no spoken dialogue, and some relatively long takes used to depict the real-time work of Boriello himself, who is the sole person in the film restoring the ship. In this regard, Faber navalis directly engages with the sensory world through the filmmaker himself, rather than through the camera or other technology as proxy for the filmmaker (and viewer). By watching Boriello literally at work, the distance between the subject of ship restoration and the subjective experience of restoring a ship is lessened (though not entirely closed or collapsed). The difficulty, of course, is in making a film about oneself and one’s work without it becoming an exercise in filmic narcissism, and Faber navalis is for the most part able to avoid the latter by granting greater audio-visual space to the sheer scale and enormity of the ship, the restoration site, and the equipment used. In the film’s description, Boriello makes clear his interest in craft and his realization of methodological “blindness” as a maritime anthropologist, or in other words, the fact that understanding how 35

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knowledge of ships, sailing, and maritime cultures must lie not only in an ethnographic description of the context, but also in the practical, the hand-made, and the physical effort of building, sailing, and repairing ships (2016).This is a film of a particular “taskscape” (Ingold, 1993), and an innovation on Karl Heider’s (2006) call for ethnographic films to record “whole bodies, whole interactions, and whole people in whole acts” (p. 114). Outside the discipline of anthropology, ethnography and the ethics of the ethnographic encounter and ethnographic knowledge are tested, challenged, and reworked by artist-filmmakers such as Ben Russell, who describes his filmmaking as “psychedelic ethnography” (2017). According to the description of a talk given by Russell in 2017, psychedelia and ethnography are two poles connected by the same objective: to understand ourselves in the world. Russell’s first feature-length film, Let each one go where they may (2009), presents an experimental echo of Rouchian ethno-fiction in 13 tracking long takes of two brothers traveling across Suriname, forming what one critic has described as a “cartographic portrayal of contemporary Saramaccan culture … that partakes in and dismantles traditional ethnography, inviting anachronism and myth-making to participate in the film’s daring conflation of history” (quoted on https:// vimeo.com/39846969).Topically, many of Russell’s films address classic “anthropological” subjects, from cargo cults to colonialism, religion and rituals, to global mining and capitalism. Aesthetically and stylistically, the long take characterizes much of Russell’s filmmaking. As a formal device, the long take certainly is not exclusive to any one particular genre of filmmaking, and yet it sutures work like Russell’s to discussions of “observational-sensory” ethnographic film.The short film River Rites (2011) provides a marked example of how Russell’s work refracts observational-sensory ethnographic conventions. The 11-minute film is comprised of a single long take of children, men, and women swimming, washing, and jumping in the Upper Suriname River, played backward with ambient sound punctuated with tracks by a noise rock band. Russell’s work ought to prompt discussions amongst anthropologists and ethnographic filmmakers that consider more seriously how other ways of filmmaking have taken up and theorized the very conventions and aesthetics considered to be “ethnographic.” Whereas ethnographic films may have tried to make sense of psychedelic experiences (Jean Rouch’s still incomparable Les Maitres Fous (1955) being paramount in this regard), Russell’s films raise necessary questions about the unknowable but felt experiences that ethnography attempts to capture. However, Russell does so by breaking apart, if not breaking down, the expectations of ethnography while maintaining a commitment to a visual patience and attention to human subjects in context. In turn, his oeuvre expands the conventions of “observational-sensory” ethnographic film to demand that we look behind the curtain, as it were, of what ethnography claims to seek and to reveal. The final filmmaker whose work presses against the limits and possibilities of ethnography and filmmaking is Alisi Telegut, a visual artist, animator, and filmmaker based in Montréal. Telegut’s richly colored animations often draw upon Mongolian stories, myths, and histories told to her by her relatives which are brought to movement and textured life in her meticulously hand-painted films such as TENGRI (2012), Tears of Inge (2013), and Nutag-Homeland (2016). Like Russell, the subjects and topics of Telegut’s work speak to anthropological concerns and themes, but in form, style, and aesthetic, the dense painted layers of her animations depict and, I would argue, demand an entirely different approach to theorizing the ethnographic in film. First, and most obviously, is the question of duration. Unlike the technology of cameras, whether film or digital, moving or still, each frame of Telegut’s animations are hand-drawn, requiring extensive engagement from both the artist and the viewer with the image as well as the way in which each frame is set into narrative motion in relation to the previous and the next one.The long take simply does not exist in this work, but this deviation from the “observation-sensory” 36

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convention does not detract but indeed amplifies the ethnographic depth of Telegut’s films by directing attention toward the imagined, yet empirically invisible, dimensions of human experience. The “thickness” of Telegut’s films is visibly apparent in the textures and edges of every painted mark making up a single image that quite literally resonates and radiates when animated. Rather than looking at an unfolding event or even looking for some sort of cultural meaning captured in visible form, viewers must look at the image itself, as image, and in so doing think through what constitutes thickness, the vibrations of the colors, and the unfolding stories told though music and visual movement. The limits of animation thus push beyond defining ethnographic film as holding onto some sort of camera-enabled fidelity to “lived experience” and toward an ethnographic perspective that is capable of and prepared to engage in acts of creation and construction, much like Deger’s call for “participant imagining.” The films and filmmakers discussed here clearly have very different, even divergent, stakes in the “ethnographic.” Without wanting to force comparisons, let alone reduce the work of one filmmaker to the arbitrary standards set by others, I believe it is nonetheless imperative for the work of theorizing ethnographic film to take stock of how and in what ways ethnography is taken up, redefined, and reimagined. Ramey (2011) reminds us that despite a relatively long and known history of filmmakers working between and betwixt the ethnographic and the experimental (i.e., Maya Deren, Chick Strand, Tracy Moffatt, and Trinh T. Minh-ha), the dialogue between these two worlds has largely, with some exceptions, been one-sided, with experimental programming more frequently including ethnographic films than the other way around (see also Ginsburg, 2018a and 2018b on Moffatt and other filmmakers whose works make important interventions in visual anthropology and “sensory ethnography” more specifically). Ramey writes, “no matter how you slice it, in order for a film or video or hypermedia or any means currently employed or as yet undiscovered to transmit anthropological information visually and aurally, that information must be in dialogue with the academic discipline of anthropology” (p. 275). For Deger and Boriello, their position as anthropologists and filmmakers have afforded certain attention to their work from the discipline. However, while Telegut’s animated films have been included in anthropological film festivals, hers are, arguably, the exception that proves the rule: namely, that the conventions of “observational-sensory” film continue to dominate discussions of ethnographic filmmaking and theorizing at the expense of other possibilities.To combat this reductionist tendency within the discipline, work by filmmakers like Deger, Boriello, Russell, and Telegut should be considered alongside one another and brought into dialogue with anthropology.

In conclusion/Inconclusive Theorizing ethnographic film should result in boundary pushing, not boundary maintenance. The conventions of ethnographic film, currently encapsulated within what I have dubbed an “observational-sensory” mode of filmmaking, provide a useful, albeit incomplete, foundation upon which to build our understandings of the relationships between sound and image, as well as lived experience and the representations of lives. Moreover, the generally shared commitments of ethnographic filmmaking—to ethical relationships, to challenging power, and to expanding processes of knowledge production—have been embedded within the very aesthetics and rationalizations that inform observational and sensory approaches, but as this chapter has aimed to show, neither these conventions nor these commitments are final or absolute. Just as the concept of “thick description” has been questioned, so too is it necessary to consider what other forms of ethnographic filmmaking might reveal and produce. Thus, the new experiments and approaches to ethnographic filmmaking discussed here indicate directions still to be explored. 37

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What might ethnography look like, when the filmmaker is actively, openly, and self-reflexively “testing aesthetics,” as Deger’s short video attempts? How can skilled “doing” reshape the representation of knowledge transmission, as in Boriello’s ship restoration? When is the long take more than a representation of real time phenomenon and something that instead enters into a space of contemplative socio-political refraction (Russell)? And how might other forms of participant imagining, such as hand-drawn images and animation, speak more fully to the humanity of culturally specific conditions (Telegut)? To return to the motivations that first underpinned this essay, the question of how to do better ethnography and what role ethnographic filmmaking might have in this endeavor is an admittedly impossible question to answer conclusively. Nevertheless, by expanding the conventions of ethnographic film and by experimenting with not only the formal but the theoretical implications of filmmaking, it becomes possible to re-envision our ethnographic commitments and put into practice different, and diverse, modes of (re)presenting the lived experiences of ourselves and of others.

References Castaing-Taylor, L. (2016). Sweetgrass: ‘Baaaaaaah. Bleeeeeeet.’ In R. Cox, A. Irving, & C. Wright (Eds.), Beyond text? Critical practices and sensory anthropology (pp. 148–155). Manchester: Manchester University Press. Cox, R., Irving, A., & Wright, C. (2016). Introduction:The sense of the senses. In R. Cox, A. Irving, & C. Wright (Eds.), Beyond text? Critical practices and sensory anthropology (pp. 1–19). Manchester: Manchester University Press. Deger, J. (2006). Shimmering screens: Making media in an Aboriginal community. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Deger, J. (2016). Christmas with Wawa: A video experiment with Yolgnu aesthetics. In R. Cox, A. Irving, & C. Wright (Eds.), Beyond text? Critical practices and sensory anthropology (pp. 163–169). Manchester: Manchester University Press. Foster, H. (1995). The artist as ethnographer? In G. E. Marcus & F. R. Myers (Eds.), The traffic in culture: Refiguring art and anthropology (pp. 302–309). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Geertz, C. (1973). The interpretation of cultures: Selected essays. New York, NY: Basic Books. Ginsburg, F. (1995). The parallax effect: The impact of Aboriginal media on ethnographic film. Visual Anthropology Review, 11(2), 64–76. Ginsburg, F. (2018a). Decolonizing documentary on-screen and off: Sensory ethnography and the aesthetics of accountability. Film Quarterly, 72(1), 39–49. Ginsburg, F. (2018b). The Indigenous uncanny: Accounting for ghosts in recent Indigenous Australian experimental media. Visual Anthropology Review, 34(1), 67–76. Grimshaw, A., & Ravetz, A. (2009). Observational cinema: Anthropology, film, and the exploration of social life. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Heider, K. (2006 [1976]). Ethnographic film (revised ed.).Austin,TX: University of Texas Press. Hockings, P., Tomaselli, K. G., Ruby, J., MacDougall, D., Williams, D., Piette, A., Schwarz, M. T., & Carta, S. (2014). Discussion:Where is the theory in visual anthropology? Visual Anthropology, 27(5), 436–456. Ingold,T. (1993).The temporality of the landscape. World Archaeology, 25(2), 152–174. Jackson, Jr., J. L. (2013). Thin description: Ethnography and the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Landesman, O. (2015). Here, there, and everywhere: Leviathan and the digital future of observational ethnography. Visual Anthropology Review, 31(1), 12–19. Leimbacher, I. (2014). The world made flesh. Film Comment, 50(2). Retrieved from: http://www.film comment.com/article/the-sensory-ethnography-lab MacDonald, S. (2013). American ethnographic film and the personal documentary:The Cambridge turn. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. MacDougall, D. (1998). Transcultural cinema. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. MacDougall, D. (2005). The corporeal image: Film, ethnography, and the senses. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Theorizing in/of ethnographic film Mead, M. (1995). Visual anthropology in a discipline of words. In P. Hockings (Ed.), Principles of visual anthropology (pp. 3–10).The Hague: Mouton Publishers. Pavsek, C. (2015). Leviathan and the experience of sensory ethnography. Visual Anthropology Review, 31(1), 4–11. Piault, M. H., Silverstein, S. M., & Graham, A. P. (2015). Discussion:Where indeed is the theory in visual anthropology? Visual Anthropology, 28, 170–180. Ramey, K. (2011). Productive dissonance and sensuous image-making: Visual anthropology and experimental film. In M. Banks & J. Ruby (Eds.), Made to be seen: Perspectives on the history of visual anthropology (pp. 256–287). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Scheider,A., & Pasqualino, C. (Eds.). (2014). Experimental film and anthropology. London: Bloomsbury. Suhr, C., & Willerslev, R. (2012). Can film show the invisible? The work of montage in ethnographic filmmaking. Current Anthropology, 53(3), 282–301. Taylor, L. (1996). Iconophobia: How anthropology lost it at the movies. Transition, 69, 64–88. Westmoreland, M. R., & Luvaas, B. (2015). Introduction: Leviathan and the entangled lives of species. Visual Anthropology Review, 31(1), 1–3.

Online films and filmmaker websites Boriello, M. (2016). Dir. Faber navalis. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtQDbJXh 1oY. Last accessed 16 January 2020. Miyarrka Media. Online film trailers. Retrieved from http://miyarrkamedia.com/. Last accessed 16 January 2020. Russell, B. (2017). “Psychedelic ethnography” presentation at the Sonic Acts Festival. Retrieved from: https://vimeo.com/208814047. Last accessed 16 January 2020. Russell, B.Artist website. Retrieved from www.dimeshow.com. Last accessed 16 January 2020. Russell, B. Online films. Retrieved from https://vimeo.com/dimeshow. Last accessed 16 January 2020. Telegut, A. Artist website. Retrieved from http://cargocollective.com/AlisiTelengut. Last accessed 16 January 2020. Telegut,A. Online films. Retrieved from https://vimeo.com/user3561872. Last accessed 16 January 2020.

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4 FILMING THE OTHER Stephanie Spray

Filming another person is an inherently objectifying act, namely because a record of the encounter is created for unseen audiences. In this light, a filmmaker is effectively an archivist of the present, and they embed their concentrated perception, or lack thereof, onto all that they record.Awareness of this changes an ordinary act of seeing and hearing from a subjective act to a collective experience of shared vision and listening. It can also turn a creative gesture into a transformative experience for filmmaker and audience alike. The person I encounter before recording is forever transformed in my eyes once I have filmed them, and I am frequently surprised by what I discover. In some cases, I notice a profound beauty or dignity that was not hidden, but that I had failed to notice prior to recording. I have had similar experiences filming places over extended periods of time. I begin to notice more minute changes and details that I had not previously seen.The place is no longer over there and separate from myself and yet the record I create of the place presents as a fragment that is clearly in-flux it as I frame it. Filming in the same places and with the same people over time, I come to realize the magnitude of their very existence, which is both as mundane and fluctuating as my own. It is this experience, and the possibility of sharing it, that sustains my practice, despite the many obstacles and frustrations that occur while making a film. My relationships with a number of people whom I have filmed over the years exemplifies this transformation. One such person is Bindu Gayak, a Nepali woman whom I came to know more deeply by spending time with her and her family while filming over several years. She was the daughter-in-law of a man who was my Nepali “father”: a Gandharva musician named Mohan Bahadur Gayak, whom I visited and recorded off and on over the years after first meeting him in 2001. I later learned that he had a second wife named Chet Kumari Gayak and that her family lived on a hill in a nearby village. Bindu Gayak was Mohan and Chet’s daughter-inlaw. Although I was initially interested in meeting and only filming Chet, whom I had heard a great deal about from Mohan and his second wife, I became especially interested in Bindu as a person and possible film subject. She was not obviously charismatic or outspoken like Mohan or others in the family, but she had a kind of dignity and aloofness that was compelling. Filming her became an excuse for me to know her and her entire family better.After completing my second film, Monsoon-Reflections (2008), I was compelled to make more work with her and close family members in her village, leading to As Long as There’s Breath (2009) and Manakamana (2013, directed with Pacho Velez). 40

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The formal progression of these films represents my own unease and struggle against common notions of cultural representation upheld or implied by mainstream documentary and ethnographic film projects. This is perhaps because in the process, Bindu Gayak and others in the village were not only people I filmed but people whom I came to know as friends over the course of many years. I realized while filming them that my work would always fall short of their depth, which suggested that this lack in the medium was worth exploring and exploiting in itself. Another lack that was obvious, and far more urgent, was their poverty. The material, economic, and educational gulf between me, a white woman from the United States of America and an “untouchable” Nepali woman and her extended family, was obvious and something we spoke about frequently. This was but one of many ethical questions that I was aware of while filming with her family, and yet it would have been ridiculous and overstated to reduce them to their poverty in the films, or to suggest that my filmmaking could solve these profound structural problems. A filmmaker from a region of the world where wealth is concentrated who then travels to film people living in areas of concentrated poverty would be remiss to suggest that through friendship alone these differences are resolved; or, alternatively, to think that creating idealized portraits of people as representatives of humanity at risk. Many have been motivated by a sense of social justice to present their subjects as lives in jeopardy, with the suggestion that cinema can help these victims and uplift them from injustice. Just as the humanitarian impulse has been the very raison d’ être for documentary filmmaking, as Pooja Rangan has convincingly argued (2017), filming disenfranchised minority groups is the very bread and butter of ethnographic film, as has been the case for anthropology broadly speaking. Perhaps the question then is how ethnographic filmmakers can address and subvert histories of representational dominance formally and practically in their work.While the participatory ethic of the discipline, or “collaboration,” has been cited as a sufficient remedy to the colonizing impulse that has driven much of ethnographic filmmaking, is this alone sufficient to address the frequent imbalance of power? Filming another person is inherently a political act and there is perhaps no topic as vexing and problematic within ethnographic film than the politics and ethics of this act.This has been the case for decades and even today, with a much greater diversity of makers and subjects than before, it remains a point of contention, as it is for the wider field of documentary. In ethnographic films, as in anthropological texts, subjects have predominantly been Other, as in non-Western, and sometimes presented as representatives of pre-modern humanity, while the majority of ethnographic filmmakers have been Euro-American and/or working with the support of EuroAmerican institutions.Additionally, the vast majority of people depicted in films deemed ethnographic were foreign to the audiences who ultimately saw them, and ethnographic filmmakers assumed the role of knowing guides through these other cultural and material landscapes.There are important exceptions to this pattern, but generally speaking the ethnographic film subjects in the first several decades of the genre were geographically and linguistically Other, and the authoritative voice of the filmmaker dominated, sometimes literally with voice-of-God narration. In response to postcolonial critiques of the discipline, many anthropologists sought a more collaborative approach and, at a minimum, began to include “reflexive moments” depicting exchanges between the filmmaker and film subjects to puncture the veneer of objectivity that was the hallmark of early ethnographic films. Jean Rouch famously developed a process of “shared anthropology,” whereby film subjects’ response to his films were enfolded into his films, or led to new works, typically of what he called ethno-fiction, further challenging the notion that ethnographic films transparently conveyed an objective truth about culture or social worlds.Trinh T. Minh-Ha’s seminal work Reassemblage (1982) went further in its critique of the 41

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portrayal of the ethnographic other, in its refusal to “speak about” the Senegalese depicted in her film, but rather to “speak nearby.” Meanwhile, media anthropologists called for a reevaluation of the field’s asymmetrical representational practices and pointed to the work of indigenous media collaboratives as another counterbalance to this trend. Following a series of course corrections and responses to the aforementioned critiques, visual anthropology as a field grew in popularity at the turn of this century, an interest that was met with the rise of institutional support for visual anthropology programs around the world, many of which offered practice-based instruction and degrees. Perhaps, in part, because of these programs or, perhaps, also due to the ethnographic turn in contemporary art practices that occurred after the turn of the twenty-first century, ethnographic filmmaking today is a remarkably diverse, if small, field of practice that continues to defy attempts at genre definition. And, yet, the problem of the filmmaker and film subject, or what Jay Ruby (1991) called the “anthropological and documentary dilemma” of representation continues unabated.This “dilemma” signals a space for ethnographic filmmakers to align their filmmaking methods and form to subvert and confront representational tropes of the cultural other.While the participatory ethic of the discipline has been cited as a remedy to the impulse toward representation and exposition, the formal and aesthetic qualities of films may also challenge the tendency to see the cultural other as fundamentally different in important ways as well. In this chapter, I seek to carve out a space for ethnographic film practices distinct from dominant documentary practices, not in its will toward the anthropological representation of a subject, nor in its subservience to the production of anthropological or social scientific knowledge, but as a practice that challenges flimsy categories of difference, as well as the underlying politics and structures that uphold them, while simultaneously navigating in the choppy wake of the early ethnographic filmmaking canon. Understood as a mode of research and expression made from the very fragments of mediated and recorded experience, contemporary ethnographic filmmaking practices implicitly acknowledge cultural and material differences, while assuming the practical intelligence and wisdom of diverse ways of being and acting in the world. Emboldened to remain in the periphery of conventional documentary practices, ethnographic filmmaking would strive to create a likeness of another, rather than reproducing the mask of a person or people as the other (MacDougall, 1998, p. 219). The contemporary ethnographic film practices I see emerging and advocate for here present subjects not as completely knowable or definable but imbued with what author and film critic James Agee called the “cruel radiance of what is” (1941). Mystery and depth in contemporary ethnographic films originate from a thick depiction of the subject within her/his/its lifeworld that ultimately leaves viewers with questions about their own assumptions about the translatability of difference and maybe even encourages reflection on perception itself. For the remainder of this chapter, I give a rough working guide of how this approach to filming would orient itself in a filmmaking practice committed to filming the other as an Other as this process nonetheless reawakens us to the world.

Filmmaking otherwise “Anthropology otherwise” is a term that anthropologists Eduardo Restrepo and Arthuro Escobar (2005) use to carve out a space for a plurality of anthropologies, or “world anthropology,” which they distinguish from the “dominant” or “mainstream” anthropologies of Western, especially US-based, institutions that are elevated as the normative or “real” anthropology by which all other anthropologies are judged. Restrepo and Escobar describe the asymmetrical ignorance that exists between the center (“dominant anthropology”) and the periphery (“other 42

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anthropologies”), whereby the center may be ignorant of the work of anthropologists along the periphery, while the periphery must always justify itself in relation to the paradigmatic and epistemic weight of the center (p. 115). As they describe it, a framework for world anthropology would be opened through a serious consideration of “other anthropologies/anthropology otherwise.” “Anthropology otherwise” implies that there is wisdom to be found in these overlooked epistemic spaces, which brings awareness and accountability to the center by revealing it as equally provincial (p. 101). “Anthropology otherwise” is also a helpful paradigm for understanding the place of ethnographic filmmaking in the “periphery,” as a so-called subgenre within the wider field of documentary. Following Restrepo and Escobar’s lead, I see no harm in ethnographic filmmaking continuing in the periphery, unmoored from the “center” of mainstream documentary film and, even, from anthropology itself; its strength lies in its plurality and fractured nature. This allows the practice to remain not only otherwise, as in different, from so-called mainstream documentary, but more likely to lean toward fruitful formal and aesthetic deviations in its attunement to the practical intelligence of its subject. This refiguring of an other not as the object of a film, but as its co-creative subject, suggests other ways of working not only in the field, but also of knowing our subjects vis-á-vis filmmaking. Filmmaking otherwise also gestures toward the work of Elizabeth Povinelli, anthropologist and working member of the Karrabing Indigenous Corporation, who describes her project as “anthropology of the otherwise.” In her recent written anthropological works (2011, 2016), she coins the term “geontology,” which she describes as “a refusal” of biopolitical divisions made between life and nonlife as essential for the governance of differences and markets in late liberalism (2014). Likewise, her work challenges simplistic divisions between self and other, biography and geography, and the biopolitics dictating these divides, to consider those “otherwises” that emerge as distinct from these predominant cultural arrangements of difference (2011, 2014, 2016). In an interview from 2014, she describes the otherwise as the “potentiality” that arises with late liberalism allowing “for new global forms of identity—the precariates, the new anarchists, the new animists, et cetera” (2014, n.p.). The films of the Karrabing Indigenous Corporation are instructive for how the otherwise, or alternate potential existences, might be conveyed in a cinematic form. As an Indigenous media arts group composed of more than 30 members, who are mostly from the Northern Territories, they use filmmaking as a form of grassroots resistance. Among their work, Mermaids, or Aiden in Wonderland (2018) stands out as a beacon for filmmaking otherwise. Mermaids is an Aboriginal futurist single-channel work in which the world has become uninhabitable because of a mysterious toxic mud that is the result of white people’s poisoning of the water and land, which is only tolerable to Aboriginals. The film is organized episodically around the loose narrative of Aiden, an Aboriginal man who is abducted from his family as a child for study as a “mud child” by white people (sometimes played by Aboriginals), who are occasionally seen venturing into this unlivable world donning Hazmat suits and abducting Aboriginal children for study. The film implicitly offers a barbed critique not only of extractive capitalism and settler colonialism, but also challenges the expectation for ethnographic explication, suggestive to non-Aboriginal audiences that their vision may not be sufficient to comprehend this otherwise existence.While the narrative abduction of Aiden clearly references Australia’s Stolen Generation of Aboriginal children forcibly removed by the state from their families in the twentieth century, much of the film’s vibrancy comes from its visual thickness: the layered images, high contrast and spectacular colors, and over- or underexposed landscapes.These and other visual effects convey something of Aboriginal Dreaming, in how they depict geography and biography overlapping literally, not symbolically. Although audiences can certainly see what seems to be a Dreaming world, it is not 43

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semantically transparent, nor readily translated. Instead, viewers are thrown into another lifeworld, or the contemporary world as it overlaps with Aboriginal Dreaming, in this case, with the promise of seeing mermaids, but instead we are transfixed by older Aboriginal women who emerge and disappear mumbling and beckoning at the mention of mermaids. Are they mermaids? We can infer as much, but it is unclear.The film makes visible, although certainly not transparently available, the otherwise in a cinematic experience that is disturbing, playful, and vibrant. The subjects of ethnographic films today—whether they be “at home” or culturally, geographically, and linguistically different from that of the filmmaker or the audience—are frequently filmic interlocutors and collaborators, savvy in their awareness of how images circulate in the world and yet who willingly become the objects of a camera’s gaze. And it is indeed a collective and plural gaze, which complicates our notion of the cultural Other in a film, just as it broadens our understanding of the film subject.As ethnographic filmmaker David MacDougall writes in Transcultural Cinema, the film subject is plural because it is formed by a “comingling” of visions. He explains: Film, filmmaker, and subject are drawn together in a fusion from which they are destined to be forced apart. This commingling is compounded by the spectator’s vision. A film that I make results from my immediate engagement with the world, and I am its first viewer.The spectator, coming upon the film as a second viewer, becomes entangled in my vision and my intentions.There is an intimation of the subject’s life beyond the film, but always infused with myself. Later on I may look at the film with an audience, and I may then have the curious experience of viewing myself viewing. (1998, p. 30) An ethnographic film is not only a material object or by-product of fieldwork, but it something actualized in this commingling of visions. If we, as filmmakers, consider the co-constitutive process of experience that arises from the viewing of a film, we are increasingly less drawn to cultural exegesis, since it is both an obvious and less compelling use of film and video. As the rendering of experience through experience (Sobchack, 1992), filmmaking’s potency is located in the potential for creating new forms of understanding and awareness of the intersubjective nature of self and other.This more open-ended way of re-orienting ourselves to filming subjects, and filmmaking more broadly, speaks to the ways in which our very thought is not only dialogic, in the Bakhtinian sense, but also co-creative, part and parcel of what anthropologist Michael Jackson describes as the push and pull of knowing oneself as a subject who acts in the world and an object being acted upon (1998).As he describes the co-creative thought process: Human beings do not simply think about themselves and others; they think through them.The same is true of events and objects or natural and supernatural phenomena; they are not only subject to thought but are the conditions of the very possibility of thought. This is why thought is always going on, even when we are not consciously thinking […] thinking is just one of many techniques humans have evolved for comprehending and negotiating the space between themselves and the world (2016, p. 2) Ethnographic filmmaking that is other-wise takes for granted the value of concentrating attention and experience on others, not from a desire to extract something from them, but with the intent of challenging conventional narratives about the discreteness of identities based on culture, national identities, race, gender, class, and sexuality. In this way, ethnographic cinema that 44

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is otherwise may indeed produce the transcultural cinema that MacDougall describes (1998), while also squarely putting to bed the troubled mission of cultural representation in ethnographic films.That said, not all cinematic forms are conducive to transcultural experiences, and there are certainly very real material and political constraints and effects that give us pause to consider how we go about filming an other and how to address these gaps. If “anthropology otherwise” enables us to speak and think against the grain of conventional documentary form, how would filmmaking otherwise enable us to see and hear the other as distinct, and perhaps constrained by different material and political contexts, but in an ethical continuum with ourselves? How might this extend not only to people, but to non-human subjects? In a world in which one million plant and animal species are currently threatened with extinction (UN Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services 2019), it behooves ethnographic filmmakers to extend their view beyond the human to consider the nonhuman in concert with the traditional purview of ethnography. A recent translation of Descola’s Beyond Nature and Culture has reinvigorated the Levi-Straussian notion of animism, whereby nonhumans are also persons with complex social worlds (2013). His work calls for a revision of the nature/culture binary that has been the hallmark of anthropology from its very origins. Similarly, a number of recent works by anthropologists have called into question the ontological distinction of nonhumans and humans, calling for a broadening of anthropology’s purview (Kohn, 2013;Tsing, 2015). In the current global crisis, how we encounter and depict the nonhuman other is no longer a question that we can consider separately from the ethics that we apply to the human other.

Ambiguous archives of the present Filmmaking along the periphery is an unorthodox, politically charged, and invigorating space for creative interventions in representation. Contrary to dominant forms, which are frequently extractive in practice and form, ethnographic filmmaking that is otherwise works against the grain of story and easy exposition.This frequently means that it sits uneasily in distribution markets and, in its defiance of genre, may be more clearly described as art. Ideally it also contends with and works cognizant of specific histories of representation of the other and the violence supported by these historical representations. In common parlance, to film or record with a camera is to “shoot” and this metaphorical rendering of a camera as a gun communicates the potential violence and power in filmmaking. In their influential manifesto,“Toward a Third Cinema,” Octavio Getino and Fernando Salanas (1969) offer another reading of the aggressive potential of the camera, stating that that camera as gun may be used to further a “cinema of subversion” that actively works against the alienation engendered by mainstream cinematic forms toward the creation of films of decolonization. They state optimistically that documentary is “perhaps the main basis of revolutionary film making.”The “perhaps” qualifying this statement is critical, for while there is potential to create the basis of a revolutionary filmmaking practice, today it is being capitalized by mass media production companies. While some have argued that documentary is now in a “golden age” (Nichols, 2017), the popularity of the form has also attracted global media service providers who are increasingly funding and producing documentaries and controlling the kind of documentary films that are made for mass audiences. Filming otherwise’s strength lies in its work along the margins, as it grinds against the tendency toward homogenization and the notion that, as “media,” documentary is yet another form of entertainment. It also defies attempts at easy characterization of subjects as types rather than complex individuals and resists easy reliance on story in its construction. 45

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It is accepted as inviolable truth in many quarters that story is king in documentary. As most documentary grant applications would lead you to believe, story is the linchpin to a strong documentary film, with character development as handmaiden.As the result, many documentary filmmakers enter the field seeking to find and ultimately extract story from their film subjects, under the belief that this is the secret to strong work, or at the bare minimum, is key to documentary structure. Conventional documentary tends to typecast people as “characters,” from whom stories are drawn and pieced together to form a narrative about a people, a culture, or a place. Filmmaking otherwise calls into question this process through a thick depiction of lifeworld, an individual, or a subject. Unlike Geertz’s notion of thick description, which stems from a strong semiotic vision of culture (1973), I will to advocate for thick depiction, which emerges from an investment not in describing culture, but rather conveying as much as possible about the sensory worlds of film subjects, conveying experience through experience.The depiction is thick because it is a time-based accumulated experience that cannot be easily distilled into a story or language-based meaning. This is not to say that story cannot inform or even guide the making of a film, since storytelling is a common tool for how we come to know ourselves and relate experience to others. Mermaids, or Aiden in Wonderland is equally structured around story as it is led by depicting Dreaming as it overlaps the contemporary nightmare of Aboriginal lands rendered toxic by industrial exploitation and mining; yet, neither the Dreaming nor the atrocities against them are rendered or explained with clear-cut meanings for non-Aboriginal viewers. Storytelling in this film is at once dead serious in its shorthand depictions of histories of systematic kidnapping, forced migrations, and other state-sponsored violence against Aboriginals, as it is poetic and dense in its depiction of Dreaming. If filmmakers understand themselves not as journalists or entertainers, who must explain or contain meaning of the ethnographic other, but rather as archivists of the present, in all of its evanescence and impossible complexity, then the paradigm for filmmaking radically shifts, as does the position of the film subject, and new forms can emerge. As archivists, what they produce is always partial and incomplete and thus liberated from the forced economy of a three-act story structure or reportage. Since they no longer aim to represent a culture through a person or people, the latter no longer bear the burden of an entire people or history. If much of what I describe seems more theoretical than clearly descriptive, it is because there are many paths and forms that can do the work described above. I offer a few examples from my own work in Nepal, although not as models, but as works from which the ideas of this chapter have developed over time. In my first films, with a caste of Nepalis known as the Gandharva, or Gāine, I was motivated by a desire to create an empathetic cinema that could overcome cultural difference or stereotypes, but to my surprise these were much of what audiences notice. For example, it was jarring for me to hear audiences describe the uncle and nephew in Kāle and Kāle as “potheads,” when they were respected healers and skilled musicians, who also smoked marijuana, even profusely. The depiction of difference and taboo in films can be especially fraught and, without a concerted effort to explain within a film, the goes against the grain of anthropological texts.Their very presence and lack of explanation in a moving document such as film and video can dwarf the other meanings critical to a subject’s life in such a limited representation as a film. In As Long as There’s Breath (2009) I was interested in developing a loose story structure to portray Bindu Gayak’s family’s longing for an absent son who in 2007 had joined the Youth Communist League, a paramilitary wing of the Maoist party in Nepal. In the editing of the film, I was drawn to the meandering conversations they would have while sitting near the street, grooming at home, or while taking a cigarette break while harvesting rice, which when extended undermined story structure, but seemed somehow more important than the story structure.These moments revealed something of the undercurrents of love and longing for their child that would arise while Bindu and her family were going about the labor and leisure time 46

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of their lives, and how their thoughts would very frequently circle back to the absent son in the midst of their lives without him. I was more concerned with developing a portrait of how they continued to lead their lives in the face of this absence, for as Bindu’s mother-in-law Chet Gayak reminders her in the film, “as long as there’s breath, there’s hope” (sãs chhãunjel ãśa). This pithy Nepali saying suggests not that they are “resilient,” a favorite word among foreign aid workers in the region, but that they simply make do and continue because they must. Many of the shots in this film are several minutes long to convey a sense of duration to index the environments and temporality of the places where I filmed, as well as because I was interested in depicting a category of experience and activity that they themselves called “time pass.”The duration of these shots in many ways undermine the story that I initially wished to organize the film around and the film feels somewhat adrift, while the presence of Bindu and others in the film is its strongest feature.The problem or question for me was how to portray this within an alternate structure, which could somehow allow for these moments to be just that, suggestions of a wider world or a depth beyond the surface of the images. In Manakamana I wished to find a way to structure extended time-based portraits of people whom I knew well or had filmed in the past, such as Bindu, Chet, Lila, Khim Kumari, Hom Kumari, Narayan, Gopika, Mithu, and others, without resorting to exposition or narrative.The film takes place entirely within a five-foot by five-foot gondola as it travels the full duration of a ride, to and from the Manakamana temple. One of my interests in this setting was that it would allow for a discreet amount of time and place that would structure the entire film. Shot on 400 foot-rolls of 16mm film, the time of the cable car ride, approximately ten minutes, and the time of an entire roll of film coincided; this was intended to provoke reflections on cinema and representation. What was most important for me in this film was that the expectation of representation or explanation of these subjects and the details of their lives be thwarted, to suggest to a viewer that they are not entitled to knowing everything, and that this would provoke them to consider the gulf between themselves and the cable car riders. I wished for this to raise questions about what it is to look and to watch another, and to leave unfulfilled the expectation that they could represent an experience or culture. On one level the film is akin to Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests, in that the film contains a series of moving portraits; but the film is also about the time of vast landscapes and the challenge of portraying changes to an environment and cultural landscapes in documentary.The physical landscape is gathered from the view from the window behind the seated film subjects, while the cultural geography of the place is inferred from what they say.While some anthropologists have expressed frustration and boredom with the film, many of these responses seem to be rooted in a patronizing sense that the film subjects or the ride itself cannot exist independently from the value of their cultural heritage (i.e., the meaning of the temple they travel to and from).This was to be expected given the discipline’s long-standing disdain for art practices, and indeed I have heard and read some disparage the film as an “art film.”This response yet again points to the continued unease that anthropologists have with art practices as valid endeavors within the discipline. Filmmaking otherwise draws freely from world cinema, contemporary art practices (both inand outside of rarified gallery spaces), avant-garde or underground cinema, and other nonfiction forms, while continuing to think and work with or against the grain of the canon or early ethnographic films. It also revels and plays with ambiguity in its depiction of another. It is not a didactic ethnographic essay or monograph, but rather allows for moments of cultural specificity to remain foreign to outsiders, not out of ignorance, but to suggest that the viewer will need to do work to better understand.They are invited to experience traces from this other world but are not necessarily entitled to full access. This is distinct from a position of willful ignorance. Instead, the filmmaker prizes and protects the trust they have gained and suggests to viewers a 47

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position of vulnerability and humility in their practice by not fully revealing or summarizing the film subject. Although filming is an inherently objectifying act, it can also be an act of care, of worldmaking, and of political reimagining.The record produced is not only of an Other, but of the filmmaker’s perception of herself in regard to something or someone other.What results is never neutral, nor total, which is why films that display or disclose their own incompleteness and partiality, rather than masking them by rushing headlong into a clear narrative stream, are often so powerful.They tell us something not only about the film subject and the filmmaker, but the fraught endeavor of making films.

References Agee, J. & Evans,W. (1988). Let us now praise famous men:Three tenant families. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Descola, P., & Llyod, J. (2013). Beyond nature and culture. London, Chicago:The University of Chicago Press. Geertz, C. (1973). The interpretation of cultures: Selected essays. New York, NY: Basic Books. Getino, O., & Solanas, F. (1969). Hacia un tercer cine (toward a third cinema). Tricontinental, 107–132. Karrabing Indigenous Corporation. (2018). Mermaids, or Aiden in Wonderland. Australia. Kohn, E. (2013). How forests think: Toward an anthropology beyond the human. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. MacDougall, D. (1998). L.Taylor (Ed.), Transcultural cinema. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Nichols, B. (2017). Introduction to documentary (3rd ed.). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Povinelli, E. (2011). Economies of abandonment: Social belonging and endurance in late liberalism. Durham: Duke University Press. Povinelli, E. (2016). Geontologies:A requiem to late liberalism. Durham: Duke University Press. Povinelli, E. A., Coleman, M., & Yusoff, K. (2017). An Interview with Elizabeth Povinelli: Geontopower, Biopolitics and the Anthropocene. Theory, Culture & Society, 34(2–3), 169–185. Rangan, P. (2017). Immediations:The humanitarian impulse in documentary. Durham: Duke University Press. Restrepo, E., & Escobar, A. (2005). Other anthropologies and anthropology otherwise: Steps to a world anthropologies framework. Critique of Anthropology, 25(2), 99–129. Ruby, J. (1991). Speaking for, speaking about, speaking with, or speaking alongside — An anthropological and documentary dilemma. Visual Anthropology Review, 7, 50–67. Sobchack, V. (1992). The address of the eye: A phenomenology of film experience. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Spray, S. (2008). Monsoon-reflections. New York, NY: Cinema Guild. Spray, S. (2009). As long as there’s breath. New York, NY: Cinema Guild. Spray, S., & Velez, P. (2013). Manakamana. New York, NY: Cinema Guild. Trinh, T. (1982). Reassemblage. New York, NY:Women Make Movies. Tsing, A. (2015). The mushroom at the end of the world: On the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press Yusoff, K., & Coleman, M. (2014). On biopolitics and the anthropocene: Elizabeth Povinelli, interviewed by Kathryn Yusoff and Mat Coleman. Society and Space. Retrieved from http://societyandspace.org/ 2014/03/06/on-biopolitics-the-anthropocene-and-neoliberalism/ .

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5 THE NEW ART OF ETHNOGRAPHIC FILMMAKING Christopher Wright

Experiments in form and aesthetics are currently enjoying a renaissance in documentary filmmaking and, although “experimental” and “art” are words fraught with anxiety and contention, I want to take them positively as a way of arguing for a new and expanded art of ethnographic filmmaking. In some ways this new art has placed ethnographic filmmaking at the forefront of documentary practice.To situate this, I want to begin with a story from the field that involves Tibetan Buddhist perspectives on the sensory and formal aspects of an experimental surf movie. For me this is a good place to start to consider the art of ethnographic filmmaking as something that emerges from collaborative audiovisual practices, the development of a co-aesthetic. It demonstrates a way of sharing creativity, filmmaking, and research. During a research visit to Ladakh at the western end of the Himalayas in northern India in 2017 I watched a surfing film from the early 1970’s with a group of friends, all Tibetan Buddhist monks. I used a tiny pico projector to throw the digital image onto the roughly plastered wall of a room in one of the monks’ houses which clung precariously to the steep slope below the main temple gompa, sitting above on the summit of a huge rock outcrop. The sound came from an equally small yet powerful portable speaker, and the acoustic effect of the room created an amazingly immersive auditory experience. Sitting on the floor we watch as successive walls of water—shot through a fish-eye lens— slowly curl over us in incredible slow motion until we look out through the tube from deep within the wave. We enter an aqueous world of flow. The hypnotic music that accompanies the footage adds to the trance-like experience. At times the camera is actually inside—moving through—the lip of the wave.The slowing down of time means that each wave can be experienced in exquisite detail, so we watch individual drops of water hit the camera lens and explode. The sun is sometimes visible through the translucent green/blue of the wave’s crest as it enfolds us. Occasionally we see the barrel of the wave revolving away from us as we are submerged.The monks—many of whom have not experienced the sea in person—watch with rapt attention. Some take photos or short film clips on their mobile phones to be hashtagged and circulated either instantly or later. At one point, as the tempo of the music builds, one of them jumps up and—with the projected light flickering over them—stands before the image and surfs the wave, provoking much laughter.The ensuing conversations cover many things; from the physical experience of the film and how it made them feel like they were surfing, to Tibetan Buddhist explanations of the relations between humans and the natural world, ideas of time, flow, and beauty, and meditations on being in the moment. 49

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This event demonstrates several important positive reasons for approaching film through—or as—ethnography. Film is something we share with those with whom we work, literally in cases like this, but also in the sense that film is something that is between us, that connects us, that differentiates us, that mediates and remediates us. Film allows us to enter different worlds. It does this experientially in terms of a viewing audience, but also because it allows us as ethnographers and filmmakers to approach and appreciate other creative, conceptual, practical understandings of worlds. The film I watched with my monk friends was George Greenough’s 1972 Crystal Voyager, a section of which features more than 20 minutes of footage shot with a shoulder-mounted highspeed 35mm camera that shows waves breaking over Greenough as he surfs on a knee board or inflatable surf mat.The specialized camera allows the footage of the waves to be effectively slowed down to ten times their normal speed.At the time of the film’s release this slow-motion view from inside the waves was a new perspective, literally allowing audiences access into a different world. In 1969, Greenough’s previous film The Innermost Limits of Pure Fun had been the first to make this world available to a wide public.The way it positioned viewers was such a corporeal experience that it had cinema audiences shouting and standing on their feet. This positioning of the viewer as participant/protagonist has of course now become the staple of millions of YouTube uploads of extreme sports footage shot using GoPro cameras—quite a significant shift in our vision. Another key element of the experiential tube footage in Crystal Voyager is the accompanying hypnotic soundtrack from Pink Floyd, taken from their album Echoes. The band had seen Greenough’s earlier film and been so impressed that they donated their music for Crystal Voyager and screened sections of the film in some of their live concerts (Edwards, Gilbert, and Skinner, 2003) Crystal Voyager is a film that both foregrounds the sensory and experiments formally— indeed the two are inextricably linked. Greenough was the first to adapt a 35mm camera to this particular representational task. He built himself underwater housings out of fiberglass, and strange awkward armatures in order to attach the camera to his shoulder. His intention was to recreate for audiences the experience of being in the tube of the wave—not make them watch someone else surfing from a distance—a perspective which had largely been the norm in surfing films up to this point. In the more recognizably documentary sections of the film Greenough talks eloquently, and in an almost religious way, about “connecting” with the wave and wanting to impart that feeling to audiences.1 As this story reveals, film is a way of engaging with different worlds and anthropology and other cognate disciplines need to expand the ways in which they approach this quality of film. Social scientists and filmmakers need to do this in terms of how films and other media are made—both the actual processes involved in producing media, and in terms of experimenting with the aesthetics and forms of film. But they also need to do this conceptually. Films are representations of different worlds but are also ways of entering into dialogues with those worlds. Much of what surfaced in my discussions around Crystal Voyager formed starting points for ongoing collaborative audiovisual work involving a sense of an emergent co-aesthetic:a hybrid of my aesthetics and theirs.Watching the DVD with friends in Ladakh allowed different and similar ideas about film to emerge between us. Suggestions about the limits of vision, the lack of a unified documentary viewing subject, the relation of vision to the spiritual etc., all remind me of the importance of embracing different, and similar, understandings of film which emerge from interactions with our collaborators.2 In this chapter I want to consider this kind of openness and engagement in relation to two recent ethnographic films, both of which allow us to explore the possibilities for experimentation and creativity that emerge from ethnographic encounters. But first I want to consider how the politics of this kind of engagement plays out 50

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in terms of discussions of the “multimodal.”Although film—in combining image and sound—is inherently multimodal, in relation to ethnographic filmmaking the term specifically refers to the use of diverse forms of “new” (usually digital) media as novel ways of engaging with, and representing, others. Discussions within and outside of anthropology about formal experimentation in ethnographic filmmaking have coincided with the increasing use and valorization of “multimodality,” and it is important to think about what it enables and disables.

Multimodal affordances In 2017 the influential journal American Anthropologist rebranded the title of its visual anthropology section as “Multimodal Anthropologies” (Collins et al., 2017), and there is a growing consensus that ethnographic filmmaking needs to actively embrace ways of working across many new digital media platforms.This seems an obvious requirement in terms of how ethnographers engage with people in the context of increasing global digital connectivity. It involves exploring the potentials of different digital media practices for making new kinds of work, shifting how research is carried out, how new forms of audiovisual work are produced, and how that work is then published or distributed.This discussion covers everything from using the co-production of web-based material as a way of engaging with people, to the ways that “linked” audiovisual content can accompany written academic publications. There are also concerns amidst the general enthusiasm for the multimodal, however. Access to digital media is not a given, but something that varies widely. In Ladakh, for example, mobile phone connectivity and internet access is incredibly limited, really only available in the main town of Leh. So, although many monks own mobile phones their usage is constrained, and culturally inflected, in various local ways. A consideration of media and their affordances needs to be central to ethnographic creativity in a critical sense, avoiding the presumption of a prefigured, or necessarily level field of digital understanding, connectivity, and collaboration. Jenny Chio raises a very important point when she asks, what does the multimodal actually help with? (Chio, 2019) Just because an anthropological article can now be published and accessed online and accompanied by a range of audiovisual media, does not in itself make a convincing argument for the multimodal. Chio is right to ask, how can multimedia “make our scholarship (more) intelligible?”, and she also suggests that we need to “rethink publication formats but also [to] reimagine anthropological knowledge production” (Chio, 2019, n.p.).We must also ask to whom is our work more intelligible? The multimodal is not just an opportunity for visual ethnographers to expand their range of creative practices, or a publishing innovation, it is a field that is intimately bound up with the forces of global capitalism. The multimodal does, however, potentially allow for an expanded range of representational strategies, appropriations, and remixes and this can function as a field for formal experimentation and a counterpoint to the single-filmmaker-authored ethnographic film. It can also allow new forms of creativity to emerge from within ethnographic encounters. But the politics of these processes need to be kept clearly in view at a time when ideas of “digital democracy” are so heavily contested. Technology, and the novelty of its affordances, should not obscure wider imbalances of power, access, and representation.As Isaac Marrero-Guillamón and Gabriel Dattatreyan argue, the multimodal signals not just an expansion of the forms which visual anthropology takes—embracing different media and media platforms—but an important shift in how it is carried out.What is required are ‘inventive engagements’ rather than a reliance on pre-existing forms of representation. (Dattatreyan and Marrero-Guillamón, 2019, p. 4) 51

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Arguments like this are a call to experimentation and creativity, and the multimodal offers many ways of sharing the processes of research and the creativity involved in filmmaking and other kinds of media production more broadly than was previously possible. Rather than an ethnographic filmmaker allowing the film’s subjects to see the footage once the film had been developed (in the case of analog film), or assist in the editing, it is perhaps now a matter of jointly remixing digital media elements that are already, and increasingly, a feature of all our lives. In this focus on joint authorship, multiple platforms and outcomes, and a co-aesthetic, the multimodal is something that in some ways supersedes ethnographic film as a category, both practically and conceptually. The previous model of a single–or several–filmmaker(s) from “outside” making a single stand-alone film is something that might now need to embrace many new forms of engagement, authorship, and forms of output. Although definitions of filmmaker, documentary, artist, anthropologist, etc. still count in many ways, the multimodal also signals the increasing acceptance of an emergent nexus of anthropology, media, and art practices, and the valorization of both formal experimentation and methodological innovation as new kinds of ethnographic film art. In discussing the current state of the relationship between anthropology and contemporary art practices, Tarek Elhaik argues that “experiments in aesthetic form have continued to thrive but conceptual experimentation remains to be desired” (Elhaik, 2013, p. 787).Although there are of course ways in which aesthetic form can be synonymous with conceptual experimentation—indeed the latter often drives the former—there continue to be divisions like this that can fuel some of the residual anthropological discomfort with art and formal experiments in filmmaking.What is at stake here is the relationship of formal difference—films and other media that look and feel unlike more traditional documentary styles—to new ways of making media through different kinds of engagements with people. Formal experimentation can be driven solely by the filmmaker without any consideration of how it relates to engaging with people. Equally, films that do not experiment formally can be the result of radically new forms of engagement. But formal experimentation can also be an emergent property of relations, encounters, and collaborations with others. Faye Ginsburg suggests that ethnographic filmmaking is currently moving in two directions. Firstly, there are the kinds of formal experiments pursued by filmmakers often concerned with the sensory aspects of film, exemplified by the work of those associated with the Sensory Ethnography Lab run at Harvard University. And secondly, there are filmmakers who seem more concerned with what she calls “relational documentary” (Ginsburg, 2018, p. 39), a style encompassing various kinds of Indigenous media production and co-production or re-mixed work.3 Ginsburg also finds that there is a certain “decolonization of documentary” underway, characterized by a decentering of the relationships and processes normally associated with an older kind of filmmaking, and a replacement of them with forms of engaged media-making that involve an “aesthetics of accountability” (Ginsburg, 2018, p. 39). Both the directions identified by Ginsburg—the formal and the relational—can of course embrace creativity and experiment, but the ease with which certain kinds of formal difference are readily labeled as “art” can still be a kind of internal limiting factor for ethnographic filmmakers both practically and conceptually. In relation to ethnographic film the term “art” has traditionally designated works that look different to, or are presented differently from, traditional documentary forms. Ethnographic film has long defined itself as something it is not—it is not commercial made-for-television documentary, it is not art, it is not experimental filmmaking—and yet it is becoming clear that arguably it is all of those.The advent of the multimodal presents a chance to move beyond many earlier definitions of ethnographic film and their various territorial strategies, even if there is still a polarized field out there in terms of naming, funding, sites of exhibition, and disciplinary identification. 52

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What is required to expand ethnographic filmmaking is the combination of relational inventiveness—which is to some degree reliant on the affordances of the technology involved— with an openness to formal experimentation. Importantly, it is also about allowing the latter to emerge from the former. Elhaik’s statement that as an anthropologist “I study Y not to enact a cultural critique of X where I am from, but to do something with Y, yet to be formulated, that will be named Z” (Elhaik, 2013, p. 792) can be seen as a challenge to ethnographic filmmakers to pursue formal innovation not for its own sake, but as one element of new forms of joint endeavor with those with whom they work. I want to argue for the productive conjunction of formal creativity and relational strategies as a new expanded art of ethnographic filmmaking. Recognizing the relationships that are possible between the two suggests ways of working that pursue many kinds of creative and inventive formal aesthetics, but that are equally attentive to the dynamics, politics, and positionality of engagements, and the collaborative evocation of different, yet shared and connected, mediated and remediated worlds.

Ethnographic film art The practical affordances of different media are not only central to the filmmaking process itself, but also organizing principles in a conceptual sense.This relationship is one way to think about ethnographic film art, and a revealing recent example of this is J.P.Sniadecki and Joshua Bonnetta’s 2017 film El Mar Ma Mar. Described as an “avant-garde anthropological film,” El Mar La Mar combines images of the Sonoran Desert near the US/Mexico border with voiceover stories from those living there and passing through (Cronk, 2019).Visually it weaves together landscape, flora and fauna, bushfires, bats, close-ups of objects left behind by migrants, frequent sections of almost entirely black screen, and so on, over all of which the narrated stories continue. Much of the film takes places in darkened landscapes, illuminated by torchlight or car headlights, and we come to inhabit the landscape as we listen intently to the qualities of the voices we hear. The addition of an eerie soundtrack of amplified ambient sounds made by putting microphones inside cacti, attaching them to barbed wire fences, and other innovative recording practices, also does much to make the film a certain kind of heightened sensory experience. Jordan Cronk, in Sight and Sound magazine, describes the film as “more like a horror film than an exercise in journalistic nonfiction” (Cronk, 2019, n.p.), and Erika Balsom in Artforum calls it a film in which “cinema and landscape come together as sites of inscription marked by an encounter between the human and non-human” (Balsom, 2017, p. 41). Objects, human and non-human, are explored in detail by the camera, and the overall sense of time feels stretched out (see Figure 5.1). El Mar La Mar was shot on 16mm film before being scanned to digital for editing, and Bonnetta argues that the analog format was chosen precisely for the way it imposes certain ways of working and for its slowness as a medium (Bonnetta, Sniadecki, and Erickson, 2018). The film was shot over a period of three years with repeated visits to the border locations involved, followed by lengthy breaks in which the resulting footage was processed and watched/edited, alongside the audio-recorded stories and soundscapes.This extended timescale feels like it runs contrary to the kind of speed and instantaneity—the instant playback—that is often associated with the digital and by extension, the multimodal.4 Bonnetta points out that: 16mm is a way of working that’s slower and more analytical. We were editing as we were working. We could work in dialogue. For filmmakers who had never worked together, it was important for us to have a dialogue. Working in 16mm helped slow things down and created that space. (Bonnetta, Sniadecki, and Erickson, 2018, n.p.) 53

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Figure 5.1 Still from El mar la mar. Joshua Bonnetta and J.P.Sniadecki.

By choosing to use 16mm film Bonnetta and Sniadecki created an intentionally extended filmmaking process that allowed the shape of the film to gradually emerge in an initially open-ended way from the material gathered and the discussions generated by it.This slow gradual process is mirrored by the equally slow cinematography of the film, lingering over objects and landscapes. The use of 16mm with its compressed mono sound strip required the filmmakers to record the soundtrack separately, and this perhaps encourages a different kind of attention to the relation between sound and image. Of course, this kind of slowness and attention to sound are also possible with digital media, but here the use of 16mm and the recording of separate sound are affordances of the technology and conceptual frameworks that creatively prefigure the final film. The filmmakers had originally intended to produce a multi-channel installation across several screens which would have required a gallery viewing space but ended up with a single-channel film in three discrete parts.With its formal experimentation it is easy to see El Mar La Mar as a kind of ethnographic film art. But alongside various kinds of formal visual, aural, and editing experimentation, El Mar La Mar also features the voices of migrants who have crossed this border desert and others who live and work there, including patrolmen. Interestingly, Bonnetta and Sniadecki made a decision not to show any of the people’s faces: There are some specific reasons why we left people’s images out, especially in the post-Trump era. It was a wise move not to connect people indexically to their voices, images and stories.We also felt that listening to a voice in a darkened space, leads to a different intimacy.A lot of audience members have said they feel more attuned to these voices because they’re not standard talking heads over images acting as B-roll. (Bonnetta, Sniadecki, and Erickson, 2018, n.p.) The access the filmmakers had to individuals with relevant experiences and stories was partly facilitated by the anthropologist Jason De León (2015), whose book Land of Open Graves documents the experiences of migrants crossing the Sonoran Desert. Cath Clarke, writing in the 54

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UK’s Guardian newspaper had this to say about how El Mar La Mar treats migrants and their stories: Initially, I had misgivings about its approach: the desperate plight of undocumented immigrants getting the experimental arthouse treatment struck me as unfeeling and irrelevant. But the film’s narcotic strangeness forces you to look again at a familiar headline story, treated unsensationally and sensitively—though at a patience-testing slow pace. El Mar La Mar is closer to a gallery installation than a night out at the cinema. (Clarke, 2018, n.p.) Here the claim is that the Trump “wall” and the ongoing news media coverage around that and other issues of migration, provides a wider context for the film. We see it set against that backdrop, especially in terms of how its formal qualities are not those we experience through other media representations of the subject. But there is also the view that the “experimental arthouse treatment” is not appropriate to traditional documentary or ethnographic-subject matter. Bonnetta says “we don’t see our film as a documentary per se. There’s elements of documentary in it, but there’s also elements of experimental film.There’s elements of narrative cinema. Mixing documentary and fiction, challenging representation” (Bonnetta, Sniadecki, and Erickson, 2018, n.p.). The reviews of El Mar La Mar reveal a residual discomfort with formal experimentation in relation to the subject matter it deals with. One could argue that the creative use of time and formal experimentation in the film emerge from an engagement with landscape or place, flora and fauna, objects etc.—a kind of filmic “aesthetics of accountability” to the non-human. And of course El Mar La Mar is multimodal in many senses, even if it uses analog media as a practical and conceptual affordance. But I want now to turn to a film which exemplifies the possibilities for formal experimentation and art to be an emergent property of the relationships involved in filmmaking itself, which is the subject of the next section.

Relational aesthetics In some respects, discussion of the multimodal resembles that around “transmedia;” relating a story across multiple digital media platforms. But with the multimodal there is a strong emphasis on using digital media as new ways of engaging collaboratively with others to make audiovisual work. Although they share a focus on the use of multiple media platforms, transmedia mostly concerns the commercial use of a range of digital media to permeate the lives of audiences, for example the simultaneous release of an online game, a TV show, and a mobile app, all based on the same content. Central to the multimodal from an ethnographic filmmaking perspective is its ability to open up not just the range of media involved, but the actual processes of media production themselves. It is this potential for combining formal experimentation across different media with a sense of relational accountability that makes the multimodal a way of expanding ethnographic filmmaking. A recent ethnographic film which exemplifies these kinds of creative potentials in embracing the multimodal is Miyarrka Media’s 2014 film, Ringtone. One of the advantages of multimodal transmedia work is that it can be far more dynamic, multiple, and ongoing than single films. Ringtone is an example of a project whose central concern was not necessarily to produce a film, but to work collaboratively across an extended range of media to produce multiple and ongoing outcomes. Ringtone has had at least two media forms, initially as one visual element in a larger 55

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multimedia exhibition,Gapuwiyak Calling—where it sat alongside other works in a range of analog and digital media, before its life as a stand-alone film.5 Ringtone was produced by Miyarrka Media, a collective co-founded in 2009 by the anthropologist Jennifer Deger and the Yolgnu leader Paul Gurrumuruwuy from Arnhem land in northeast Australia. The collective’s actual constitution and membership though, is far more varied and context dependent, with different individuals coming together for specific projects. Ringtone is about the ways in which mobile phones have brought a range of connections, intrusions, possibilities, and demands to the Yolgnu community of Gapuwiyak. It involves and activates different kinds of collaboration but is also importantly a kind of outgrowth or extension of the kinds of media activity that Yolgnu themselves already engage in with their mobile phones and other technologies.Yolgnu make mobile media products such as small films of themselves dancing, photographic collages made up of images taken from the internet combined with those of family etc., and they also employ the ringtones of phones in creative and locally meaningful ways. Ringtone is an extension of those media activities.As Gurrumuruwuy puts it (see Figure 5.2): One way or another, everybody’s using their phone to connect. It’s new. But then again, it’s not. Even your ringtone can call you back to country, back to family, back to where you belong.Yolngu record clan songs from funerals with their phones and set them up as their ringtone.Whenever someone phones you hear that manikay (public clan song) and boom … you’re there. Just like sitting on the ground. (Gurumuruwuy and Deger, 2016, p. 86) One of the other media works in the Gapuwiyak Calling exhibition was a large touchscreen work called Warwuyun (worry) made up of 50 digital collages made by Yolgnu on their mobile phones. The individual collages can be accessed through the touchscreen and transformed or remixed into an ever-changing series of patterns and grids (see Figure 5.3). Deciding to display multiple copies of what are otherwise small digital images on individual mobile phones had unintended aesthetic consequences.Taken en masse the small collages visually

Figure 5.2 Still from Ringtone. Jennifer Deger and Paul Gurrumuruwuy.

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Figure 5.3 Warwuyun (worry). Miyarrka Media.

resembled the effects—light, shade, color, grids—of Yolgnu bark paintings. Gurrurmuruwuy describes it like this: This is a new kind of art. It might look different to a bark painting to you, but we see them the same way. Because first we added in light and colour and make those separate, separate bitja [pictures] really deep, really rich and full of energy.Then we made this touchscreen to make these patterns stronger. To connect wider and deeper.At the 57

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same time, we want to draw you close, … Maybe, as you look, you’ll think about your own loved ones. Maybe you will cry with us. (Gurrumuruwuy, in Deger 2017, p. 54) This is art that emerges from a shared endeavor and, like the aesthetics of Ringtone, it grows directly from the collaborative engagements involved in its making. Even the straight-to-camera framing of Ringtone grows out of this engagement, as Deger describes From the first video project I did with Yolngu in 1995, I had been struck by the ways that people would talk straight to camera, energetically and authoritatively telling their story, and explaining things that they were uniquely positioned to speak about.They knew they were speaking to future audiences, they expected to find themselves face-to-face with others in the future, understanding the camera as generating a reciprocal field of visuality.A time delayed machine for face-to-face encounter and explanation.This way of talking to camera translated (mostly) comfortably to this intercultural context and for me is the key to the ethical-aesthetic of a film about Yolngu ways of communicating and connecting. (Deger, personal communication, 2019) In Ringtone Yolgnu sit facing the camera directly, with their full body visible, and often with family and kin in the background—a subtle difference to the usual talking heads of much documentary filmmaking. Deger and her co-directors worked with a cinematographer and, having set the camera up on a tripod, adjusted the framing and balance via a monitor: [We] set up the frame and then other people would check the monitor and go and put themselves in frame, to intensify the relationships within the frame—and reaching out from it. Although they didn’t say so, I think people wanted the frame to feel full of life and family connections—especially as one person in frame could look so lonely. Or someone else would come in and just take up a position. Or Gurrumuruwuy, or his daughter, our producer, Guruŋulmiwuy, would direct people to sit down within the shot. (Deger, personal communication, 2019)6 This is a filmmaking process that is happy to embrace formal experimentation and difference, but one that locates that creativity and inventiveness as something that emerges at the intersection of local concerns and media affordances, rather than as an advance and/or sole decision of the filmmakers.As Deger argues, Ringtone involves a relational aesthetics that is not only embedded (as in the formative relations between the crew and the subjects, and the forms of accountability and kin-based casting and story telling that is involved in producing something shaped by kinship structures, authorities and obligations), but enacted and indeed activated within a shared audiovisual field of intercultural connection and social potential. In other words, although Ringtone was made for non-Yolngu audiences, it refracts a Yolngu appreciation of the power of the senses to constitute social relations in its choice of both form and content. (Deger, personal communication, 2019) In the Yolgnu context asking questions and recording answers is not an appropriate form for extracting information. Instead people need to be given opportunities to offer stories that they have the right to know and tell, and the film creatively applies this narrative convention in its 58

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structure, framing, and editing. In this sense Ringtone is exemplary of the potential for formal experimentation and aesthetic creativity to emerge from collaborative engagements: a fusion of aesthetic differences through the joint representation of worlds.

Expanded ethnographic film Both El Mar La Mar and Ringtone experiment formally, although in very different ways, and both are suggestive of new directions for an expanded art of ethnographic filmmaking. The kinds of formal difference and aesthetic experimentation that they pursue are now far more acceptable and widespread than was previously the case in ethnographic filmmaking, and that is a very positive development. Formal experimentation is something to be actively and positively embraced. But what is currently at stake is where that experimentation comes from.What drives it? I would argue that a new art of ethnographic filmmaking should involve the exploration of new forms of engagement with collaborators that are made possible by the affordances of media as a route to creative formal experimentation.There needs to be a willingness to experiment with the social relations involved in producing films or other media—part of a necessary decolonization of documentary—accompanied by an equally open approach to the emergence of aesthetics, or co-aesthetics, directly from those processes of engagement and collaboration. What is important about the current concern with the multimodal is the insistence on creative potentials of the relationship between the relational and the formal. Film allows us to enter different worlds in many ways.The finished film allows us some kind of glimpse of other experiences, but the making of films also involve us directly in collaborations and relationships with different worlds.These differences should be embraced and explored, but they are always commensurate to the task of imagining and creating new possible worlds through the shared processes of research and worldmaking through film.

Notes 1 It would be interesting to pursue this aspect of the film—and Tibetan Buddhist understandings of it—in terms of Nathaniel Dorsky’s ideas of “devotional cinema” (Dorsky, 2003). 2 See also Rutherford (2006). 3 See for example Geronimo Inutiq’s amazing multi-screen installation Arcticnoise—Hennessey et al. (2018), and Hogue (2015). 4 See for example Paolo Favero’s smartphone mapping project— http://www.americananthropologist.o rg/2018/02/21/with-the-smartphone-as-field-assistant-designing-making-and-testing-ethnoally-a-m ultimodal-tool-for-conducting-serendipitous-ethnography-in-a-multisensory-world/ 5 Ringtone was released as a stand-alone film in 2016 and was part of the Gapuwiyak Calling exhibition installed at the University of Queensland Anthropology Museum, and also at the Margaret Mead Film Festival in the Museum of Natural History in New York in 2014. See also the websites associated with the media collective and the exhibition—www.miyarrkamedia.com and www.gapuwiyakcalling.com 6 It is worthwhile considering this filmmaking process in relation to Rolf De Heer’s discussion of making work around the Ten Canoes project—Personal Reflections on Whiteness and Three Film Projects. http: //australianhumanitiesreview.org/2007/08/01/personal-reflections-on-whiteness-and-three-film-pr ojects/ See also Patrick Sutherland and Tashi Tsering’s discussion of a similar preference for whole bodies in still photography in Spiti in the western Himalayas—Sutherland and Tsering (2011).

References Balsom, E. (2017). Film: Best of 2017. Artforum International, 56(4), 41. Bonnetta, J., & Sniadecki, J. P. (2017). El mar la mar. US:The Cinema Guild.

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Christopher Wright Bonnetta, J., Sniadecki, J. P., & Erickson, S. (2018, December 16). Directors Joshua Bonnetta and J. P. Sniadecki on their challenging non-fiction El mar la mar. Retrieved from http://www.studiodaily.co m/2018/02/directors-joshua-bonnetta-j-p-sniadecki-challenging-non-fiction-el-mar-la-mar/ Chio, J. (2019, January 5). Guiding lines. Retrieved from https://culanth.org/fieldsights/1118-guiding-lines Clarke, C. (2018, December 11). El mar la mar review—Haunting images of life on the US-Mexico border. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/aug/02/el-mar-la-mar-review-us-mexico -border-documentary Collins, S. G., Durrington, M., & Gill, H. (2017). Multimodality: an invitation. American Anthropologist, 119(1), 142–46. Cronk, J. (2019, January 6). El mar la mar. Retrieved from https://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sigh t-sound-magazine/reviews-recommendations/el-mar-la-mar-jp-sniadecki-joshua-bonnetta-sonora n-desert-docuementary Dattatreyan, E. G., & Marrero-Guillamón, I. (2019, February 18). Introduction: Multimodal anthropology and the politics of invention. American Anthropologist 121 (1): 220-228 Retrieved from https://anthros ource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/aman.13183 De León, J. (2015). Land of open graves: Living and dying on the migrant trail. Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. Deger, J. (2017).Warwuyun (worry) in the age of the selfie. Artlink, 37(3), 52–57. Dorsky, N. (2003). Devotional cinema. San Francisco, CA:Tuumba Press. Edwards,A., Gilbert, K., & Skinner, S. (Eds.). (2003). Some like it hot:The beach as a cultural dimension.Aachen, Germany: Meyer & Meyer Verlag, pp. 139–140. Elhaik,T. (2013).What is contemporary anthropology? Critical Arts, 27(6), 784–798. Ginsburg, F. (2018). Decolonizing documentary on-screen and off: Sensory ethnography and the aesthetics of accountability. Film Quarterly, 72(1), 39–49. Greenough, G. (1969). Innermost limits of pure fun. USA: Surf Video Network. Greenough, G. (1972). Crystal voyager. USA: Blue Dolphin. Gurrumuruwy, P., & Deger, J. (2016). Mobile phone remix: Miyarrka Media. Artlink, 36(2), 85–87. Hennessy, K., Lynn Smith,T., & Hogue,T. (2018). Arcticnoise and broadcasting futures: Geronimo Inutiq remixes the Igloolik Isuma archive. Cultural Anthropology, 33(2), 213–233. Hogue,T. (Ed.). (2015). Arcticnoise.Vancouver, Canada: grunt gallery. Miyarrka Media. (2016). Ringtone. Canberra, Australia: Ronin Films; London, UK: Royal Anthropological Institute. Rutherford, A. (2006).‘Buddhas made of ice and butter’: Mimetic visuality, transience, and the documentary image. Third Text, 20(1), 27–39. Sutherland, P., & Tsering, T. (2011). Disciples of a crazy saint; the Buchen of Spiti. Oxford, UK: Pitt Rivers Museum.

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6 BEYOND ETHNOGRAPHIC REPRESENTATION Robert Willim

This chapter deals with ways in which digital technologies can be utilized to work with moving media in hybrid ways. It will resonate with practices of ethnographic film, but it will also attempt to move beyond traditional, representational notions of this practice, very much in line with the ideas of the “new world of ethnographic film and video” that Phillip Vannini outlines in the introduction of this book. With a background in ethnology and ethnographic cultural analysis, throughout my career I have blended artistic practice and fieldwork as part of a process I call art probing (Willim, 2017a, 2017b). Art probing is as an extended and open-ended process of art making and research which is not based on traditional systematic observation. The foundation of art probing is explorative doing/making combined with reflexive analysis and non-representational practice (see Vannini, 2014). Art probes are used as instruments of evocation with a double function. Firstly, they can strike inspiration and be possible points of departure for future research, and secondly they can be used to communicate scientific concepts and arguments beyond the scope of academic worlds. In this chapter I will discuss how I have used film and video within my art probing projects to evoke worlds and concepts and to spark ideas connected to ethnographic research. Instead of straightforwardly framing my work as ethnographic film, I intend it as derived from ethnographic work but spinning away from academic contexts. Used in art worlds and together with stakeholders other than academic scholars, this work can still possibly speak back to practices of ethnography and cultural theory, but also go beyond it. Central to the way in which I have been using film and video for art probing is the idea of works being generative and open-ended. In this sense there is no final cut, but instead the different works are provisional renditions that are part of a generative and iterative process where what appears to be a finished work is instead the sprout for another work and for possible insights and ideas within (and beyond) research. One common denominator for the art probing practices I will present in this chapter is an exploration of digital and material cultures, and in particular of the role of mediation and how emerging technologies can be related to different practices as well as to earlier technologies. I will describe three entwined aspects of how I have been working with moving media under the headings: Noise, Blend Modes, and Live Cinema. But first I want to situate art probes in the broader non-representational world of research creation. 61

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Art probing: movements between art and research Art probing is part of what I call a more-than-academic practice. It can be related to the way inventive methods have been discussed by Celia Lury and Nina Wakeford (2014). In their introduction to a collection of inventive methods within social research, Lury and Wakeford advocate the importance of conducting research that is “explicitly oriented toward an investigation of the open-endedness of the social world” and that can deal with “the happening of the social world” (Lury and Wakeford, 2014, p. 2, italics in original). Art probing is also attuned with the developments of non- or more-than-representational theory and methodology as it has been discussed within cultural geography and neighboring disciplines (Lorimer, 2005; Thrift, 2007; Vannini, 2014). According to Phillip Vannini (2014), non-representational methodology is to a lesser degree focused on correct and appropriate representation of empirical material, of life-worlds and events, and instead it is used to animate, to enliven, to resonate and create rupture, and even to “generate possibilities for fabulation. If indeed there is a quintessential non-representational style, then it is that of becoming entangled in relations and objects, rather than studying their structures and symbolic meanings” (p. 320). Non-representational methods and art probing explicitly appreciate that there are manifold ways of knowing.Art probing stresses the affective, the sensuous, and the performative as important dimensions of sense-making processes. Art probing should also be seen in relation to new hybrids of academic research and art, like artistic-research and research-creation (Borgdorff, 2012; Schneider and Wright, 2013;Vannini, 2015: 3). One of the central aspects of art probing however, is to keep art and research semi-detached. To totally subsume artistic practices within the infrastructural and administrative world of academia, would most possibly remove some of the intrinsic potential of open-endedness and—dare I say—freedom of artistic practice. Therefore, art probes should be seen as part of a more-than-academic practice, a way to not predefine processes of knowledge creation or definitely define meanings and what is once and for all signal or noise.

Noise The poor image tends toward abstraction, artist Hito Steyerl writes. The poor image has been uploaded, downloaded, shared, reformatted, and reedited. It transforms quality into accessibility, exhibition value into cult value, films into clips, contemplation into distraction.The image is liberated from the vaults of cinemas and archives and thrust into digital uncertainty, at the expense of its own substance. The poor image tends toward abstraction: it is a visual idea in its very becoming. (Steyerl, 2009, p.1) This is a good point from which to start thinking about one important aspect of art probing practices, namely the notion of noise. Noise is an ambiguous entity, conceptually related to clutter, waste, corrosion, as well as irregularity.Along these lines in 2010 together with my colleague Tom O’Dell I organized a workshop at Lund University on the irregularities of ethnographic work. We subsequently published a thematic issue of the journal Ethnologia Europaea called Irregular Ethnographies (2011).At that time an idea I had been exploring in my artistic work was noise. Therefore, I wanted to probe noise and irregularity through a specific artwork that was not exactly ethnographic, but could possibly speak back to practices of ethnography. It was a work based on feedback loops and iteration called Close to Nature (2011). 62

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Visual noise can make an image uninterpretable or incomprehensible, but it can also be experienced as a slight blur of an image. In signal theory, the “noise floor” is the background against which communication occurs. Its source can be atmospheric radiation, interference among various types of equipment, the limitations of electronic circuitry and components or artifacts and glitches produced within coding or software.The noise floor is the inconspicuous and overlooked background that people normally ignore in order to concentrate on what they consider to be significant in a certain situation. A digital video file consists of data. It might be based on images captured by a camera or it can be computer generated.To make a digital video file visible it has to be decoded and output through equipment that generate images, like screens or projectors. In order for digital data to be experienced by a human, it has to be transduced and turned into something that can be experienced sensorially. In anthropologist Stefan Helmreich’s words transduction is “the transmutation and conversion of signals across media that, when accomplished seamlessly, can produce a sense of effortless presence” (Helmreich, 2010, p. 10). In processes of transduction there is no clear line, no automatic natural divide, between what is signal and what is noise.Within filmmaking there are, for example, conventions and aesthetics connected to visual resolution, color, blur, and detail.When new technologies that, for example, give the possibility to higher visual resolutions are introduced, the conventions between detail and blur have to be reconsidered. What is an expected or appreciated blur or lack of detail and what is a disturbing distortion? This question becomes especially important in relation to artistic genres that valorize what in several other contexts is considered as unwanted noise. Low image resolution, visual artifacts, anomalities and manifestations of the erroneous are transmuted into aesthetic expressions within genres of glitch art, for example (Betancourt, 2016a; Grundell, 2016; Menkman, 2011). The removal or filtering out of noise is an important part of creative practices like filmmaking, as well as in processes of data management. To smoothen dark images that can be experienced as grainy, or to remove lens flares or other optical effects can be part of an editing or post-production process. The post-production process can however also include the addition of filters that produce grain, noise or lens flares and blur (Willim, 2013a). Like all editing, sorting, and arrangement, this maintenance, this filtering, has its own politics, aesthetics, norms, and peculiarities. Just a slight change in the resolution or color grading of images, and video can turn something that is appreciated into something that is experienced as inappropriately distorted, while in another context this alteration is instead highly appreciated. When working with computers and other digitally engendered editing and production tools there is an enormous amount of possibilities to change a captured material. Video can be smoothened and irregularities can be removed, but when is something smooth enough? If we assign the manipulation or the noise filtering to algorithms, someone or something has to decide how these algorithms sort out noise or smooth a data set or a data stream.When video is recorded we get a data stream that is transduced into a file, or a file could also be generated by software. Decisions on when and how to intervene in a data stream have to be made in relation to norms, genres, aesthetic appreciations, and stylistic preferences. Once noise has been defined and framed, one can either filter it out or transform it into something valuable (Willim, 2014; cf. Krapp, 2011). My project Close to Nature (https://vimeo.com/44951079) was a work built on the idea of an iterative noise-inducing process. It related to the play between noisy poor images and abstraction that artist Hito Steyerl addressed in the quote above, as well as to genres of glitch art. Close to Nature was probing ideas about how visual experiences of nature are evoked and engendered through uses of technology. It was also part of a more extended exploration of mediation, imaginaries, and space that I had been working on. It took place in an area in Northeastern Finland 63

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and it was inspired by works like Nam June Paik’s TV Buddha and Alvin Lucier’s I’m Sitting in a Room (Hamilton, 2004; Kahn, 2009). The execution of the work was partly based on using technology beyond the context of its intended use. This de-contextualized technology was a small device called the Viddy, made by the German company Intenso. It was quite a prosaic communication device marketed as a video messenger. It had a small 1.8” lo-resolution screen, a camera, and a microphone. It was equipped with a magnetic rear panel, making it possible to attach it to steel surfaces (like the door of a fridge). The video messenger was intended for use in a social communicative loop between people in a domestic setting. A person could record a message (max. 30 seconds) by using the camera and microphone, and then place the Viddy somewhere in the house. Another person could then turn up, find the messenger and by pressing a button they could play back the message.This is a simple closed loop of data being processed and becoming part of domestic sociality.The technology was a remediation of earlier technologies like a note and a pen.What the Viddy introduced in the loop was a recorded audiovisual dimension utilizing digital data. The Viddy also featured a USB port, making it possible to transfer the recorded video clip to a computer.This hints at another part of the marketing of the Viddy, seen in “YouTube your life: upload messages to the Internet” (https://youtu.be/em8RWWWZTqs). This feature was nothing unique at the time the Viddy was introduced (around 2010). It could hardly compete with the audiovisual quality provided by smartphones or other kinds of networked devices. A smartphone offered immediacy between capturing film, sharing, and socializing in a worldwide network that the domestic Viddy could not match. Instead the simplicity offered by being a low budget “fridge magnet video messenger” with a quite straightforward “press one button”interface probably was a better marketing hook. However, the Viddy turned out to be quite unsuccessful on the market, especially when compared to the growth of services provided by social media platforms at the time. For Close to Nature I used the camera of the device to record a view of a marshland in northern Finland. I used the Viddy’s limited features, including the possibility to transfer files to another device. I also wanted to stay with the idea of a closed loop, intrinsic to the main concept of the Viddy.The shaky and pixelated 30-second clip was characterized by the limitations of the device.The composition consisted of the leaves and branches of a birch tree in the foreground, with the marshland and a remote forest under blue skies stretching out behind. The recorded clip was exported to a laptop. It was played back, while the image on the screen was recorded with the Viddy, bringing the image slightly closer to the viewer. Here the limitations of the Viddy were fully utilized.The re-recording created noise, distortion, and glitches that caused the image to start breaking and cracking, forming patterns, and evoking colors not visible in the first clip.This procedure was iterated eight times, bringing the image closer, while also making it more abstract. Each time the procedure was repeated the clip was transmuted between different formats or conformations, between digital code, between data, electric currents, algorithms and the analog world of light and matter outside the electronic circuits.This iterative loop is a kind of counterpoint to the social domestic loop intended for the Viddy.Trees, moss, grass, and the open sky replaced people, were turned into data, output, and reiterated into a new stream of data. There is no clear point when data or visual information turn into noise in the iterative process. If we compare this process to ethnographic endeavors, we get another perspective on representation/non-representation, iteration, and generation of what is considered and framed as empirical material.The birch tree in Close to Nature came visually closer through the iterated mediations, but while coming closer, the image started to dissolve and introduce glitches, color patterns, and shapes that made it impossible to discern signal from noise. Processing (and abstrac64

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tions) of ethnographic material does also introduce non-representational patterns and evocations of noise, incorporating the ethnographer in phenomenological loops of mediation and iteration.The question of how we “come close” to people is something that has been dealt with in ethnography since its inception. New technologies have sometimes been embraced as tools that might bring us closer and give new insights, but they have also been seen as noise-inducing and distorting. Here, Close to Nature became a good tool to think through and feel with, and I have used ideas derived from the work in subsequent works and publications (Willim, 2014; also see Pink et al., 2018).

Blend modes Noise can be connected to excess, overflow, and sensory overload. Sorting, sequencing, and organizing are ways to handle noise and excess.While Close to Nature was geared toward inducing noise and blending it with what was in the first iteration framed as intended information (or content), it was still temporally organized in a sequence of separate clips. Nine 30-second clips in 4:3 aspect ratio followed each other in an ordered sequence.The noise induced through the iteration process was intentionally framed in this simple and straightforward arrangement.The excess of information was captured, framed, and screened. To extend the discussion of noise in relation to art probing, let us introduce the concept of blend modes.The point of departure for this concept is a technical term derived from image or video editing software like Adobe Photoshop, After Effects, or Apple’s Final Cut Pro. Blend modes are used in the practices of compositing.They determine how different visual layers (of images or video) mix with each other. In a broader sense, blend modes might be a way to conceptualize mixes and amalgamations of media and visuality. The use of compositing and different blend modes can be related to the organizational logic of collage and montage.Temporal montage has been utilized throughout film history to evoke complexity, to create thought-provoking and affectively evocative juxtapositions, and also in attempts to picture the invisible (Betancourt, 2016b; Manovich, 2001; Suhr and Willerslev, 2012). Inspired by early Soviet constructivist filmmakers like Dziga Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein, Christian Suhr and Rane Willerslev (2012) advocate that we might use montage as an effective technique in addition to realism in ethnographic film to create an enhanced perception of social realities.They propose uses of montage as a disruptive device that can break the mimetic dogma of the humanized camera (2012, p. 283).The montage they foremost concentrate on is a temporal one, but there are a number of other ways to work with spatial aspects of montage like (parallel) “windowing” and various kinds of simultaneous visual juxtapositions (Ahtila and Aarnisuo, 2017; Betancourt, 2016b; Elhaik and Marcus, 2010.) The montage technique of compositing uses layers of video streams within the same frame to generate a visual multiplicity. By using software like After Effects or Final Cut Pro the ordering of layers and different blend modes generates highly complex composited visuals. How visual layers blend within this software is determined by the order of the layers and the blend modes. When two layered video clips are mixed using the normal blend mode, the clip placed above will simply cover the clip below. If the opacity of the top clip is reduced, the underlying clip will start to appear, and all the color channels of the two clips are merged. If many clips are mixed using this blend mode and reduced opacity, the result will be a “washed out” whitish (noisy?) video. There is a number of different blend modes available that produce other results. Using the overlay mode for example, will make the parts of the top layer where the underlying layer is light become lighter, while the parts where the layer below is dark will become darker. Mid-gray areas of the top layer will be unaffected. 65

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In several of my works I have used multiple layers and different blend modes in order to evoke certain effects. It is a kind of conceptual extension of the way in which noise was approached in works like Close to Nature. In some works, I have aligned this technique with questions about ethnographic fields and the relation between different sites. In the work Fieldnotes (2013) three films based on layered imagery were made as a worldmaking experiment.The footage from each film was taken from a certain undisclosed site and was given an evocative name, Veiled Hotel, Wet Market, and Straight Jetty. The image streams were layered and combined using different blend modes. It was a way to play with ideas about imaginary geographies, documentation, sitespecificity and the possibility of ethnographic blend modes—themes I had been dealing with in several previous works (Willim, 2013b). For the soundtrack of the Fieldnotes episodes I used electronically generated sounds, and I utilized an audio effect that could be conceptually aligned with visual layering of images.The effect, called a convolution reverb, was based on the mathematical process of convolution. To convolve two electronic signals is to fold them into each other (Murphie, 2013, p. 2). Most commonly the effect is used to apply the acoustic quality from a specific space to a sound. For example, a dialogue between two persons can be recorded and then the sonic characteristics of a specific space—let’s say the interiors of a certain car model, a closet, or the Taj Mahal—can be convolved with the sound of the dialogue to give the impression of the voices being placed in the specific space.This effect can blend sound with spaces in numerous ways, creating very different effects. By using convolved sounds together with several visual layers, complex audiovisual composites can be engendered. By playing with blend modes and layering techniques, figure/ground alterations and multistable states can be evoked.The notion of multistability based on simultaneous competing interpretation of a perception (e.g., a layered video stream) also problematizes ideas about what is noise in a signal. Ambiguities and figure/ground alterations make room for different kinds of sense-making. In several of my projects, like Fieldnotes, Almost There (Washington Park) and Possible Worlds the otherworldly and states of multistability were evoked (Scott, 2014;Willim, 2017b).The utilization of different blend modes and experiments with noise have been intrinsic to this probing moving media practice.

Live cinema A third feature of art probes is the possibility to alter works in real-time by live performance. Before I address how I have been working with live performance and live cinema as part of my art probing practice I would like to anchor my discussion in the ways academic work is often supposed to be presented. How are academic texts presented live? Disciplines like anthropology, ethnology, and sociology have been mostly dwelling in the world of static written words and readings. Think about the two notions of papers and readings that are used in classrooms and seminar rooms in often unproblematized ways. Primary tools of academic practice have been books, papers and pens, black- or whiteboards. During the last decades papers (at conferences or as the basis for teaching) have been transformed into presentations. A paper at a conference is often nowadays a presentation, a lecture which generally includes a projected visual backdrop. Spoken word is thus combined with the projected images from slideware such as Microsoft Powerpoint (Robles-Anderson and Svensson, 2016). This is the academic context against which practices of ethnographic film, as well as more-than-academic practices of art probing, have to relate. Films are step-by-step becoming integrated into these infrastructural frameworks.Videoclips can be integrated with slide presentations, and video players are used 66

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during academic presentations.There is definitely a performative potential in these situations, even if it is still seldom harnessed. The infrastructural genealogy of ethnographic film is to be found in the world of cinema screenings.Today films and videos are however often watched on handheld or mobile screens. Venues for film can be cinema theaters or auditoriums, but also the spaces before small handheld screens, or in-between multi-screen projections in galleries or in outdoor environments. The spaces of film can also be evoked through augmented reality applications that mix virtual visual material with different spatial settings. Film can even be screened in the virtual venue of a computer-generated world. But even if a viewer can interact to some extent with the visual material, it would still be produced, distributed, programmed, or installed for screening.What if we then take the unharnessed potential for performativity that is hidden in the (academic) world of presentations and combine it with ideas about post-cinematic practices that break with the industry of cinema? This would be to take ideas about live cinema seriously.This would make films into more provisional renditions. Systems and devices based on digital technologies have given opportunities to turn cinema, film and video into different kinds of live experiences through which moving media can be performed. Phillip Vannini discusses the uses of the words film and video in the introduction, and outlines how the concepts could be distinguished and understood.Two related concepts are cinema and movies.When I use cinema here, I refer to specific genealogies. Cinema has been everything from the popcorn-smelling screenings of blockbusters to more challenging experiences of experimental and abstract film. There are, however, also more unspecified futures for cinema. It doesn’t necessarily have to take place in traditional theaters where what we today call movies are projected to a seated audience in an auditorium. However, the word cinema evokes a concentrated audience that experience a film or performative event during a specified window in time. This is something quite different from the often distracted or fragmented viewing of, let’s say,YouTube videos.This is why I prefer to use the word cinema and not video or film to outline a potential future trajectory of live cinema. Filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola is one of the advocates for a complex kind of distributed live cinema (Coppola, 2017). It takes inspiration from how televised live events have been produced and organized and combines it with the artistic dimensions of feature filmmaking and theater. The idea is to blend live-acted and pre-recorded parts that are streamed to different venues where the audience can experience the live cinema event. It merges the logic of the shot (film), the scene (theater), and the event (television) into a live produced montage (Coppola, 2017, p. 9). Another kind of live cinema is less technologically complicated, but it has interesting potential to develop forms as extensions of ethnographic film. It is based on the live mixing of prerecorded clips and shots with real-time rendered computer sound and visuals. Its genealogy is to be found in the world of electronic music and VJ’ing. For some time, different genres of live mixed visuals have been used together with live performed music. Software like Modul8 or Resolume used with different hardware setups makes it possible to create complex arrangements of projected multi-screen visuals that can be used in different venues.The techniques and tools of this strand of live cinema can be coupled to bricolage and remix methodologies (Markham, 2017). Live cinema gives the potential to utilize different blend modes in layered live mixed compositings that can also be projected to multiple screens and surfaces (spatial montage). I have been working with several projects where live cinema has been part of the art probing practice. In several of these the compositing practices described above have been utilized. One example of live cinema work is my project Possible Worlds. It was a project that started as a work commissioned by the Museum of Ethnography in Stockholm in 2014, and which then led to 67

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further iterations of the first live cinema event (Willim, 2017a, 2017b). Possible Worlds can be described as an ongoing experiment in worldmaking and rendition. Its fundamental aspect is an audiovisual performance: a live cinema event that can be organized for selected audiences.The performance is based on surreal juxtapositions and layerings of sound and images collected on field trips conducted for different projects. In the first iteration of the performance which was the work commissioned for The Museum of Ethnography, much of the material came from the archives and collections at the museum.The result was an attempt to explore notions of ethnographic surrealism (Clifford, 1981). I had been asked to approach the question of how museums summon different worlds and imaginaries.A question that became a point of departure was “what could happen if we connect ideas about ethnography, museum-practice and science fiction?” Here, experiments with blend modes, convolution, and multistable states could be utilized.When Possible Worlds was performed at the Museum of Ethnography it took place in a room called The Myth Theater. It is an intimate room, and the place for an exhibition of Dance Masks from Western Africa. The masks had been collected by choreographer Birgit Åkesson during a number of trips to Western Africa. This was the spatial framing for the 30-minute performance, evoking potential associations to everything from the French expedition Mission Dakar-Djibouti of 1931–1933—important for James Clifford’s discussion of ethnographic surrealism (1981)—to the evocative works of filmmaker Jean Rouch in Niger (Henley, 2009) and the sensuous scholarship of anthropologist Paul Stoller (2008). The live-cinema event was followed by a round-table discussion on the topic of worldmaking within museums. Staff from the museum and a number of curators took part in the event, together with specially invited guests like experts in surrealism and science fiction, musicians, artists, anthropologists, and authors. Possible Worlds was also open to the public. Here, live cinema was used as a tool of evocation in a context where the concept of ethnography was dealt with critically and open-endedly. The audiovisual material used in the performance was not anchored in any empirical field. It was intentionally altered, blurry, mixed, and part of multi-layered compositing. Based on notions of noise and multistability—generated through the use of different blend modes and convolution—the audiovisuals were not documentary or representational. This live cinema event was instead generative and performative.The primary ethnographic place of Possible Worlds was the museum and The Myth Theater. Possible Worlds was maybe ethnographic in the sense that it was about ethnography, but it clearly attempted to go beyond ethnography, to be more-thanethnographic, more-than-academic.

Final cut? Art probing is based on a method of letting material and conceptual cues from one work and one context spill over to the next work, forming a generative and iterative open-ended process through which ethnographic film can be one element. Here, film and the ethnographic are elements of a more extended process.The examples that I have been discussing are all part of an ongoing art probing practice. In line with my work with art probes I propose that we see all “final products” of ethnographic work, like film or other renditions as something more provisional and open-ended, as part of a more-than-academic-practice, an extended probing process (Willim, 2017b). Let us not too easily distinguish signal from noise, let us consider the role of (ethnographic) blend modes and the meaning of live performance and remix in practices of moving media, exemplified here by live cinema. We still don’t know much about the shape and content of future iterations of 68

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what we today call ethnographic film, especially while new practices emerge and new technologies and media are developed and employed.A film might be a result but also a probe.The process doesn’t stop when a(n ethnographic) film reaches its audience. Instead, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, the possibly final cut is often just the end of the beginning.

References Ahtila, E.-L., & Aarniosuo,A. (2017). Seeing through the eyes of others. Nordicom-Information, 39(2), 51–57. Betancourt, M. (2016a). Glitch art in theory and practice. Critical failures and post-digital aesthetics. London: Routledge. Betancourt, M. (2016b). Beyond spatial montage:Windowing, or the cinematic displacement of time, motion, and space. London: Routledge. Borgdorff, H. (2012). The Conflict of the Faculties. Perspectives on Artistic Research and Academia. Leiden: Leiden University Press. Clifford, J. (1981). On Ethnographic Surrealism. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 23(4), 539–564. Coppola, F. F. (2017). Live cinema and its techniques. New York, NY: Liveright. Elhaik, T., & Marcus, G. E. (2010). Curatorial designs in the poetics & politics of ethnography today: Conversation between Tarek Elhaik & George E. Marcus. In A. Forero & L. Simeone (Eds.), Oltre scrivere le culture/beyond ethnographic writing (English/Italian edition) (pp. 177–194). Rome:Armando Publishers. Grundell, V. (2016). Flow and friction. On the tactical potential of interfacing with glitch art (Doctoral thesis). Stockholm University, Stockholm. Hamilton, J. (2004).The way we loop now: Eddying in the flows of media. Invisible Culture, (8), 1–24. Helmreich, S. (2010). Listening against soundscape. Anthropology News, (December), 10. Henley, P. (2009). The adventure of the real: Jean Rouch and the craft of ethnographic cinema. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Kahn, D. (2009).Alvin Lucier: I am sitting in a room immersed and propagated. OASE Journal for Architecture, 78, 24–37. Krapp, P. (2011). Noise channels: Glitch and error in digital culture. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Lorimer, H. (2005). Cultural geography: The busyness of being “more-than-representational.” Progress in Human Geography, 29(1), 83–94. Lury, C., & Wakeford, N. (2014). Introduction: a perpetual inventory. In C. Lury & N. Wakeford (Eds.), Inventive Methods.The Happening of The Social (pp. 1–24). London: Routledge. Manovich, L. (2001). The language of new media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Markham,A. (2017). Remix as a literacy for future anthropology practice. In J. F. Salazar, S. Pink,A. Irving, & J. Sjöberg (eds.), Anthropologies and futures (pp. 225–242). Oxford: Bloomsbury Academic. Menkman, R. (2011). The glitch moment(um).Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures. Murphie,A. (2013). Convolving signals.Thinking the performance of computational processes. Performance Paradigm, (9), 1–21. O’Dell,T., & Willim, R. (2011). Composing ethnography. Ethnologia Europaea. Journal of European Ethnology, 41(1), 26–39. Pink, S., Ruckenstein, M.,Willim, R., & Duque, M. (2018). Broken data: Conceptualising data in an emerging world. Big Data and Society, 5(1), 1–13. Robles-Anderson, E., & Svensson, P. (2016).“One damn slide after another”: PowerPoint at every occasion for speech. Computational Culture, 1–14. Retrieved from http://computationalculture.net/one-damn -slide-after-another-powerpoint-at-every-occasion-for-speech/ Schneider,A., & Wright, C. (Eds.). (2013). Anthropology and art practice. Oxford: Bloomsbury. Scott, M. (2014).White walls,“Black City”: Reflections on “exhibition as residency-art, anthropology, collaboration.” Visual Anthropology Review, 30(2), 190–198. Steyerl, H. (2009). In defense of the poor image. Retrieved from www.e-flux.com/journal/10/61362/indefense-of-the-poor-image/ (accessed 23 October 2017). Stoller, P. (2008). The power of the between.An anthropological odyssey. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Suhr, C., & Willerslev, R. (2012). Can film show the invisible? Current Anthropology, 53(2012), 282-301. Thrift, N. (2007). Non-representational theory: Space, politics, affect. Oxon: Routledge. Vannini, P. (2014). Non-representational ethnography: New ways of animating lifeworlds. Cultural Geographies, 22(2), 317–327.

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Robert Willim Vannini, P. (2015). Non-representational Research Methodologies. An Introduction. In P. Vannini (Ed.), Non-representational Methodologies: Re-envisioning Research. London: Routledge. Willim, R. (2013a). Enhancement or distortion? From the claude glass to Instagram. In: Raqs Media Collective and S. Sarda (Eds.) Sarai reader 09: Projections. Delhi: Sarai Programme. Willim, R. (2013b). Out of hand. Reflections on elsewhereness. In A. Schneider & C. Wright (Eds.), Anthropology and art practice. Oxford: Bloomsbury. Willim, R. (2014).Transmutations of noise. In B. Czarniawska & O. Löfgren (Eds.), Coping with excess. How organizations, communities and individuals manage overflows. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishers. Willim, R. (2017a). Art probing and worldmaking. Exploring museum imaginaries. Hamburger Journal Für Kulturantropologie, 7, 77–97. Willim, R. (2017b). Evoking imaginaries: Art probing, ethnography and more-than-academic practice. Sociological Research Online, 22(3), 1–24.

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7 FROM ETHNOGRAPHIC MEDIA TO MULTIMODALITY Samuel Gerald Collins and Matthew Durington

Ethnographic film and video in the twenty-first century is no longer a self-contained linear product available on one medium such as VHS tape, 16mm film, or DVD disc. In fact, even if an ethnographic film or video follows a traditional form of production and dissemination through festivals and distributors, it is viewed, advertised, promoted, and disseminated through a variety of multimodal forms that make up our mediascape possibilities today. The journal American Anthropologist is considered the flagship journal of the American Anthropological Association. In 2017, editor Deborah Thomas rebranded the visual anthropology section of the journal as multimodal anthropology.The reaction was swift from established visual anthropologists (including the authors of this essay) that this was possibly diminishing the standing of visual anthropology in the discipline as many had pushed hard in previous years to get the visual anthropology section in the journal. However, we, along with many others in the field, saw this as a real opportunity to be more inclusive of the various media that anthropologists both engage with in their research and disseminate as anthropological work. As we stepped into the editorial role for this section alongside our colleague Harjant Gill, we made a concerted effort to both recruit and encourage anthropological work that went beyond ethnographic film to include many different forms of multimodal work as detailed in the various forms we describe in this essay. Even though many forms are considered here, there are numerous other multimodal forms that can be recognized such as the large canon of work in the anthropology of art and analysis of all kinds of visual, aural, and sensory anthropologies that demonstrate transmedia that can be utilized both within and outside of the discipline (Pink, 2001). As we outlined in our invitation to our colleagues for the first journal issue for which we became editors, we see multimodal anthropology as creating more opportunities for multiauthorship and collaboration (Collins, Durington, and Gill, 2017).While this disrupts the power structure often found in authorship, it also provides new opportunities to move away from the lone anthropologist, emboldened by a colonial history and continuing to reinforce the power structures of this discipline that moves our collaborators to the side despite the recognition that anthropology does not exist without the voices of our collaborators.The emphasis on writing and text that has shaped the discipline throughout its history is both understandable and necessary.Yet, this creates ideological closure to the “leakage” of other inputs and outputs that thwart the primacy of the text. Thousands of anthropologists have demonstrated this through their emphasis on both cultural forms and means of output that go beyond the text. A multimodal 71

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anthropology recognizes and encourages the complex nature and “messiness” of culture by engaging the primacy of process, recognizing it, and giving merit to it. The engagement of multimodal possibilities brings a sense of this reality to traditional forms of ethnographic film and video. As multimodal anthropology continues to get traction in the discipline and expands, a robust critical analysis of it has begun to emerge. In “Bad Habitus: Anthropology in the Age of the Multimodal,” our colleagues Stephanie Takaragawa, Trudi Smith, Kate Hennessey, Patricia Alvarez Astacio, Jenny Chio, Coleman Nye, and Shalini Shakar question the potential liberatory and democratic possibilities of a multimodal approach in the discipline: Although the idea of multimodal anthropology may challenge dominant paradigms of authorship, expertise, capacity, and language, we argue that there is nothing inherently liberatory about multimodal approaches in anthropology.Therefore, as our discipline(s) increasingly advocates for the multimodal in the service of anthropology, there is a need for deep engagement with the multimodal’s position as an expression of technoscientific praxis, which is complicit in the reproduction of power hierarchies in the context of global capitalism,‘capital accumulation’ … and other forms of oppression. (Takaragawa et al., 2019) This critical approach and questioning of the multimodal is both necessary and welcomed. Imagine if alongside the emergence of ethnography historically in its nascent forms was conjoined to a critical analysis from its inception. Imagine if calls for multi-authorship and disruptions of power occurred at the beginning of anthropology. Imagine if producers of ethnographic film and video engaged participatory and multimodal forms from the inception of a project. Could storyboards, notes, process, and other elements of pre-production become part of the final ethnographic film and video product? What would anthropology look like today if the field was concerned with multi-authorship, recognition of all types of forms of outputs and radical epistemologies that emerge from their combination and remixing? These are exciting times and while parallel to emergent technologies and forms, they are not determined by them, but should rather be utilized by producers of ethnographic film and video to continue to both produce novel forms of production and simultaneously critically approach our epistemologies.

Comics and drawing Current interests in drawing and illustration as a form of multimodal anthropology begin with a series of multimedia and multisensorial installations entitled Ethnographic Terminalia, exhibits that included illustration and comic art (Buckley, 2016). These were joined with a series of provocations from Tim Ingold (and others) urging anthropologists to consider drawing as an ethnographic method. Introducing a collection of papers following a 2009 workshop, Ingold concludes Finally, we wanted to consider the potential of drawing, as a method and a technique much neglected in recent scholarship, to reconnect observation and description of the movements of improvisatory practice.This is to think of drawing not just as a means to illustrate an otherwise written text, but as an inscriptive practice in its own right.As the lines of drawing and weaving the very text and texture of our work. Our aim, in short, was to lay the foundations for a true graphic anthropology. (Ingold, 2011, p. 2) 72

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Ingold’s work has been followed by multiple engagements of drawing and illustration, among them Causey’s 2017 book, Drawn to See (Causey, 2017), several articles for the American Anthropologist, and a graphic novel, Lissa (Hamdy and Nye, 2017). But these multimodal interventions have a long history in the field, one that cultural anthropology has managed to marginalize and forget.That said, other subfields have not had the same experience. Drawing and illustration have long played a prominent role in archaeology and, for some archaeologists, illustration has proven more useful than photography (Steiner, 2005).These tendencies have translated well into digital illustration, and, beyond that, to different digital platforms, including VR (Gonzalez-Tennant, 2010). In cultural anthropology, things develop differently. There is a long history of drawing in anthropology, grounded in several traditions, among them the sketches of nineteenth-century tourists, and illustration in the natural sciences. Indeed, in the nineteenth century, technical illustration was a regular part of scientific education and practice, and it continued to be until film, photography, and professional illustration replaced it in the twentieth century. In ethnographic work, drawing is a way of both documenting culture and a way of eliciting information, both through commissioned drawings (what we could call “ethno-illustration”) and through the use of drawings and illustrations to elicit commentary from interlocutors, the ancestor to John Collier’s photo-elicitation practices in the twentieth century (Pink, 2001). Franz Boas had received training in illustration as part of his degree in physics (Glass, 2018, p. 74).When he went into the field in the 1880s, it was, therefore, natural for him to make sketches about what he saw. Later, with his co-author and collaborator, George Hunt, Boas would commission drawings from indigenous interlocutors, especially sketches of masks and other material culture (Glass, 2018, p. 78).These illustrations (his own and others) would be circulated throughout his career: as proof, as context, and as touchstones for ethnographic interpretation. Drawings could do things photographs could not: they could be produced by anthropologists or by interlocutors, and circulated between them in order to stimulate different kinds of collaboratively produced ethnographic data. Eventually, though, the ease, speed and infinite reproducibility of photographs supplanted illustration in the field (Hurdley et al., 2017). Photography, of course, has its own affordances in a multimodal anthropology, but when we return to illustration as a multimodal approach, it is with the understanding that drawing constitutes a different way of knowing altogether, one that implies not only a method, but an interpretive community. As Hurdley and colleagues argue, drawing also opens our eyes to a different kind of looking, even a different mode of shaping the world. Sitting and looking at a familiar object, such as the clock on the mantelpiece or the door one has entered a thousand times, makes it strange. (Hurdley et al., 2017: 750) In other words, “drawing” is only in the last instance a question of representation. Instead, it is the drawing itself—the haptic practice—which leads to the cognitive estrangement at the heart of Harkness’s method. Similarly, the turn to comics and graphic novels over the last five years has also evoked new realms of knowing and practice.As Paul Karasik writes in his afterword to Lissa,“words and pictures conspiring together to create meaning and understanding in this fashion can only happen in comics” (Karasik, 2017, p. 243). But not just this: comic art and the graphic novel represent a familiar vernacular form utilized all over the world for anything from entertainment to public health education (Hamdy and Nye, 2017). In this way, the graphic novel combines the haptic knowledge implied in drawing with the democratization of discourse through comics and 73

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graphic novels. Moreover, Lissa is a collaborative work, bringing together anthropologist and artists with fieldwork that was both collaborative and applied.Although Lissa has been one of the first, sustained experiments in this multimodal anthropology, there are several others pending. While illustrations, still or moving animation, graphics, drawings, and other forms are included in multiple ethnographic film and video works throughout the twentiethth century, we would question and challenge these producers today if they see these forms as mere expository aspects of a staid traditional film or video. Or, rather, if they are being utilized to push epistemological, collaborative, and multimodal possibilities in ethnographic film and video production historically never considered in analysis or imagined contemporaneously. In any case, drawing focuses anthropological attention on the power of images to produce alternative meanings and, like film, resist reduction to text-based interpretation.

Photography Any discussion of ethnographic media production and photography merits its own essay, but we want to consider the same reclamation project that a multimodal approach provides us.There is a definite parallel between the history of photography and anthropology (Pinney, 2011).While visual anthropology is often equated with ethnographic film, when one considers the expanse of visual accompaniment to anthropological work throughout time, the primacy of photography is readily apparent. In its early iterations photography was appreciated for its supposed capacity of providing a permanent record of an event or place when a language barrier or speech was in existence or fieldnotes considered less objective (Pinney, 2011). Elder figures to the field such as Franz Boas employed photography as part of their methodology lock step with traditional approaches to fieldwork. Boas used photography on his first field trip to Baffinland in 1883 (Jacknis, 1984).While the use of photography by Boas and other progenitors of the field was not meant to exotify indigenous cultures, much of that early work is considered to be Eurocentric and evidence of a colonial past in the discipline (Edwards, 1994).While the potential exoticism that emerges in photographing Indigenous populations is now critically approached in anthropology, it does not mean that other entities such as National Geographic continued to follow a cultural salvage approach throughout most of the twentieth century (Lutz and Collins, 1993). National Geographic only recently admitted in a special series devoted to race that their coverage was racist (Goldberg, 2018). An important book in the recognition of photography as a research tool was the publication of Visual Anthropology: Photography as a Research Method.Authored by John and Malcolm Collier (2001), this landmark publication is the touchstone for any syllabus or publication that attempts to discuss photography and its merits. Malcolm Collier has continued to assert the dilemma that photographic practice represents in the field by suggesting that “photographs and other optical records of human experiences may be both creations and concrete reflections of what is visible within the scope of the lens and the frame” (Collier, 2001, p. 35). Recent multimodal experiments with photography include the dual project of the Society for Visual Anthropology and the Society for Cultural Anthropology project Writing with Light. This experiment in rejuvenating or, better yet, reimagining the photo-essay uses the etymology of the word photograph as a premise for work. Using the standard photo essay as a launching point, the collective hopes to create/rethink/utilize photography as a means for new epistemological ideas in anthropology.This notion of questioning both the visual as form and the typical modus operandi of publication venues and their standing in the discipline is at the heart of a multimodal approach that seeks to disrupt both the notion of authorship and who can fulfill that role.This is far beyond the standard use of photography in ethnographic monographs which 74

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usually serves as in situ proof of the fieldwork experience, or, perhaps as a tromp l’oeil of an imagined ethnographic engagement. The deceptive quality of photography as proof of endeavor finds its roots in semiotics theory, art, and other fields. From asking the questions of “This is not a pipe” to “Pictures can’t say aint,” the empirical authority of photography or artistic rendering should never be relied upon completely in its static form alongside text.This is what makes social media-based photography so interesting as a possible multimodal form for ethnographic film and video that goes beyond simply promoting those forms of production.While typically utilized for its social and fun qualities, many ethnographers such as Dick Powis are utilizing spaces such as Instagram as a fieldwork tool both in terms of its research and connectivity possibilities to collaborators, and as a means of illustrating fieldwork and eliciting comments (Powis, 2017).This is the prescient argument we were trying to make in Networked Anthropology in that social media should not be seen as a leisurely activity outside of the scope of anthropological inquiry much like television was decades ago, but as a multimodal space that creates novel networks and participatory capacities with our collaborators where the idea of authorship begins to crumble. And, it is a challenge we would place before ethnographic film and video producers as perhaps a space to demonstrate process whilst creating these forms and building new connectivities with collaborators and audiences beyond branding and promoting their work.

Social media Multimodality is more than the sum of its multimedia. It also recognizes that media platforms are differently networked to different publics in a variety of contexts.This can mean “live fieldnoting” your work on Instagram (Powis, 2017;Wang, 2013;), utilizing Facebook or other platforms to organize a photo exhibition (Dattatreyan, 2015), reciprocating with YouTube users through your own video commentary (Markham, 2012), or, in a platform that pre-dates “social media” per se, blogging the struggles and negotiations of fieldwork. In all cases, the advantages are similar: (1) immediate feedback from colleagues and interlocutors; (2) increased visibility and transparency through readily accessible, public platforms; and (3) the opportunity for new contacts in the field and/or at home.The concerns are also similar.As we have discussed at some length (Collins and Durington, 2014), the networked visibility of social media is simultaneously its biggest drawback with regards to ethics, the confidentiality of interlocutors, and the desires anthropologists and interlocutors have to present data in the context within which they were intended. However, as Powis (2017, p. 360) points out, the ethical questions raised by social media are equally applicable to print—especially digital print, which, like its more “social” counterpart, has more and more incorporated socially networked affordances. Social media have also become a key element in film, with the dissemination of ethnographic film being accompanied by successive waves of social media marketing and discussion. While social media are utilized as a promotional tool, could they expand the form and capacities of ethnographic film and video? Do they create new and novel networks? Not all anthropologists have downplayed the importance of networks of correspondence.As, perhaps, one of the last, great correspondents of the twentieth century, Margaret Mead wrote much more than occasional missives to her family and friends. Letters drove her fieldwork and served as fora for theoretical provocations, as well as a catalyst to her ever-expanding ambit of networked connections. It was not egocentricity that led Mead to keep carbon copies of most of her (typed) correspondence. She knew their value. Moreover, consonant with her interest in cybernetics, Mead was also conscious of the power of the platform itself to shape the content of communication (Collins, 2010). When she was working with Gregory Bateson in Papua 75

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New Guinea in the early 1930’s, she would correspond with small slips of paper sent back and forth by messenger: “designed for recording fieldnotes, these specially-sized pieces of paper facilitated, piece by piece, an ongoing intimate conversation of personal, logistical and anthropological issues” (Caffrey and Francis, 2009, p. xxvi). Not surprisingly, Mead was an early adopter of technologies for scholarly communication, including both the telephone and reel-to-reel recordings. In fact, her prodigious production of correspondence only began to abate with her investment in telephony. This resistance to acknowledging the embeddedness of anthropological fieldwork in telephony is not just from fieldwork ideologies that elevate the importance of face-to-face encounters over other forms of communication; it also comes from the insistence on anthropological methods as distinct from quotidian life.The “field” is constructed according to degrees of difference, and the stereotyped tools of anthropology—camera, notebook, typewriter—are exceptional documentary practices that literally remove the fieldworker from the mise en scène in order to engage their anthropological practice.Yet it all becomes a good deal messier if “field” and “home,”“familiar” and “strange,” aren’t seen as dichotomous, but as deeply interpenetrated fields of practice. And if this is true of the telephone, how much more the case for the smartphone? With global adoption rates ticking up to nearly 50 percent, many of ethnographic film and media producers’ interlocutors (and especially younger ones) utilize smartphones to do the same things they do: keep in contact with friends, set up appointments, share ideas and media content. If we acknowledge that much of our production process looks similar to the things people do every day, what do we lose? Something of the mystique and the pretense to the authority and auteur of the ethnographic film and media producer, doubtless. That said, producers still bear the onus to work with ethical frames that include working to confront power—but here, we are frequently not so different from our interlocutors as well. Ultimately, though, the turn to social media offers a path toward a more public, more collaborative ethnographic film and media.What we see in projects such as Karen Waltrop’s work among immigrants to Denmark is precisely this robust sense of social media as not only a tool for data collection, but as a platform for collaboration and, ultimately, an opportunity for the co-production of ethnographic work (Waltrop, 2017, p. 103). In other words, fieldwork unfolding both on social media and through social media. How to weave that into the traditional form of ethnographic film and media is a challenge to imaginative and creative sensibilities of forthcoming producers of these media. In actuality, the choice is not whether or not to utilize social media in one’s work: meeting people “where they are” requires that we use the same communication platforms they use, platforms that more and more of us have grown up with. The real question is whether or not to acknowledge our embeddedness in networked social media.

Audio As any competent ethnographic documentary filmmaker will impart, the most important thing to consider when creating film or video is sound. One can be the most accomplished aesthetician or auteur, but if sound is meant to accompany the visual medium and is not adequate for the task, then the entire enterprise fails.The most obvious connection to sound for the discipline is found in ethnomusicology and leading figures such as Steven Feld have demonstrated the power of sound in anthropological practice. As a linguist, ethnomusicologist, and anthropologist, Feld has made a profound impact both on the discipline and beyond. Looking upon his work and practice one can assert the reclamation exercise being proposed through multimodal anthropology. His work in the later twentieth century in Papua New Guinea forwarded song 76

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and sound as primary foci of his fieldwork, which then translated to his outputs. His notion of schizophonic mimesis theorizes how sound can be removed from its primary context and rearranged and recognized differently as a separate context entirely. This speaks to and influences the notion of “remixing,” which not only defines popular music forms in the later twentieth century but is utilized as a notion in multimodal anthropology to discuss how work can be rearranged and recontexualized through collaborative work. Steven Feld’s own capacities as a musician undoubtedly influenced his thinking as a pioneer in this aspect of the field. But what is he called? Is he ever labeled as an aural anthropologist or as a sound anthropologist in the same capacity someone working with film would possibly be labeled as an ethnographic film or media producer? In many ways, despite the prominence of Feld in the field, he suffers the same issue of marginalization as others who attempt modes of multimodal practice. Sound, in this case, is relegated to the same marginalization that early forms of visual work suffer. The film or photographic record is the evidence of “real” ethnographic work that occurs in fieldwork through note taking and various methodologies. Despite the albums and other sound platforms created by Feld and others, it still resides in the shadows of text as the primary mode of dissemination of anthropological knowledge. Work in ethnographic sound does not have a mode of dissemination until recently enabled by new technologies. How does one publish sound? The fieldwork interview taped on a variety of media must be transcribed, coded, and moved through the medium of text to be deemed meritorious. Yet, any fieldworker would attest to the importance of the aural in anthropological fieldwork. In a sensory approach to anthropology it stands as one of the primary five senses. One does not have to look far into the annals of the fields to find statements of “how the jungle sounded” for the lone anthropologist in the exotic field, or, the decibel level of the “streetscape” or the urban anthropologist. It is there and it is primary but it stands as evidence of in situ and must be described to the reader via text. Even when sound is the primary focus of ethnography, as in the work of Brian Larkin in Nigeria focusing on radio and colonialism, we do not hear the radio broadcasts nor the din of music and sound around the theaters that are his primary field sites. The work of pioneering ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax stands alone as a body of work that is recognized primarily for the actual sound that was created and recorded by him. But, it is deemed scientific and relevant due to the context that surrounds it, including his methodology and its housing in the Library of Congress.Anthropologists dedicated to ethnomusicology continue to push for the primacy of sound in anthropological fieldwork and outputs, as evidenced at the University of Sheffield.

Design anthropology Since the 1990’s, designers have turned to qualitative and social design methods to bring impacted communities into the design process. For example, it is not uncommon for UX (userexperience) designers to incorporate a short stretch of ethnographic methods into their product development.These early appropriations of anthropological method led to designers assuming the mantle of “part-time anthropologist” for a few days, in order to build their knowledge of communities and to achieve the “buy-in” of locals (Ventura and Bichard, 2016). In doing so, however, designers have utilized ethnographic methods in order to justify the top-down interventions in developing new commodities and in commodifying communities for development (Chin et al., 2017). More recently, the “flow” has been reversed and anthropologists have begun utilizing design principles in their own work. In other words, they have been developing a full-blown “design 77

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anthropology,” “in which anthropologists borrow concepts and methods from design to traditional ethnographic forms” (Murphy, 2016, p. 434). Extrapolating on this, some have suggested an “anthropology by means of design, involving ‘moving forward with people in tandem with their desires and aspirations rather than looking back over times past’” (Gatt and Ingold, 2013, p. 191).To some degree, this vision of design anthropology has been remaking the way anthropology is taught and learned, with departments at the graduate and undergraduate level including design education in their curricula. There are at least two consequences to this turn to design for ethnographic film and media production. First, the embrace of social design is at the heart of ongoing efforts to enjoin communities in collaboration, one that builds towards the needs of the impacted community and, ultimately, remains accountable to that community. Second (and as a corollary of the first), design anthropology involves a number of multimodal forms that range across the human sensorium and that potentially complicate and enrich visual ecologies, including aural and tactile materials that are part of a process of “empathy, open-endedness, and situatedness” (Gregory, 2018, p. 222).That is, the films and texts that mark the culmination (and the closure) of traditional, anthropological fieldwork are here replaced with “major events and milestones” (Smith, 2017, p. 120) that help to articulate this design conversation at a particular time and place and are not meant to truncate and reduce the flow of ideas, discourse, and practice to a text-based “deliverable.” Does one film this process and simply regurgitate it as ethnographic film and media production? Or, do these collaborative capacities set a new form of pre-production and elements of a final product? One of the more common forms of design anthropology is the gallery show, but the difference between this and other forms of display in anthropological work are marked. For example, when Chin and her students collaborated with a youth in a non-profit program (Jovenes Inc.) in Los Angeles, they “produced a huge amount of audio, video, and photo reports.All the products of our research were organized and shared openly with Jovenes so that it could access and use everything for its own purposes” (Chin et al., 2015 p. 246). An eventual public installation provided “a platform” for the youth to communicate their identities, their activism, and their thoughts on place. In other words, the “products” of this design anthropology were not those of the anthropologist at all: they consisted of multimodal expression produced by and for particular communities, with anthropologists facilitating, recording, and enabling in the background. Does the physical gallery replace the ethnographic film and media as final product of which it is only one constituent component of making meaning? In addition to Elizabeth Chin, the recent work of Jason DeLeon and the emerging Hostile Terrain 94 gallery project does this. It embeds ethnographic film and media as a component of a larger project on clandestine migration. In the future, we would expect the anthropology of design to continue to grow and diversify in the field. Furthermore, the move to an “anthropology by design” promises to re-make anthropology altogether into something more horizontally organized, transparent, and accountable, with numerous transmedia punctuating collaborative work over the course of a project intervention of which ethnographic film and video are one component of a larger fabric. Both the presence of anthropologist Elizabeth Chin in an art school in California and her experimental work constantly critiquing both anthropological forms of knowledge, authorship, and collaboration demonstrates the possibilities of a design anthropology. Her recent work in Haiti and through the Lab of Speculative Ethnology demonstrates the power of design that is not mired in a top-down social design model that continues to be utilized and replicates colonial models, but rather seeks to disrupt, experiment, and collaborate without predetermined outcomes.The absence of a predetermined outcome may send fear down the spines of ethnographic film and media producers, but it opens up all kinds of multimodal possibilities. 78

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Conclusion While not exhaustive, we have attempted to convey a number of multimodal media that could be considered for inclusion in the thought process, production, and dissemination of ethnographic film and video. While there is a long history of including all types of expository elements in ethnographic film and media production, the inclusion of multimodal capacities is meant to challenge the epistemological and ideological underpinnings of the traditional production process and disrupt the power dynamics that exist in these forms that replicate colonialism and other problematic hierarchies. It is also obvious that the inclusion of various multimodal forms is made available by emerging technologies and forms, they are not determined by them. Simply put, the move from ethnographic media to multimodality is not a radical departure from what ethnographic film and media producers already do, but a challenge and opportunity to rethink the ways of producing, knowing, networking, producing, and sharing these forms.Thus, we call upon ethnographers to become something more than visual artists or filmmakers, and move toward becoming transmedia storytellers.

References Buckley, L. (2016). Ethnography at its edges.American Ethnologist, 43(4), 745–751. Caffrey, M. M., & Francis , P. (2009). Introduction. In M. Caffrey & P. Francis (Eds.), To cherish the life of the world (pp. xxi–xxxiii). New York, NY: Basic Books. Causey, A. (2017). Drawn to see.Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press. Collier, M. (2001).Approaches to analysis in visual anthropology. In T.Van Leeuwen (Ed.), The handbook of visual analysis. New York, NY: Sage. Collins, S. (2010).‘An electronic buzzer is always laughing’:The Josiah Macy, Jr. conferences on cybernetics and the anthropologist’s joke. Cybernetic and Human Knowing, 17(3), 45–64. Collins, S., & Durington, M. (2014). Networked anthropology. New York, NY: Routledge Books. Collins, S., Durington, M., & Gill, H. (2017). Multimodality:An invitation. American Anthropologist, 119(1), 142–146. Dattatreyan, E. (2015).Waiting subjects. Visual Anthropology Review, 31(2), 134–156. Edwards, E. (1994). Anthropology and photography: 1860-1920. New Haven, CT:Yale University Press. Gatt, C., & Ingold, T. (2013). From description to correspondence. In W. Gunn, T. Otto, & R. C. Smith (Eds.), Design anthropology (pp. 139–158). New York, NY: Bloomsbury. Glass,A. (2018). Drawing on museums. American Anthropologist, 120(1), 72–88. Goldberg, S. (2018). For decades our coverage was racist.To rise above our past we must acknowledge it. National Geographic, April (pp. 1-2). Gonzales-Tennant, E. (2010). Virtual archaeology and digital storytelling. African Diaspora Archaeology Newsletter, 13(3), 1. Gregory, S. (2018). Design anthropology as a social design process. Journal of Business Anthropology, 7(2), 218–234. Hamdy, S., & Nye, C. (2017). Lissa.Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press. Hurdley, R., Biddulph, M., Backhaus,V., Hipwood,T., & Hossain, R. (2017). Drawing as radical multimodality. American Anthropologist, 119(4), 748–753. Ingold,T. (2011). Introduction. In T. Ingold (Ed.), Redrawing anthropology (pp. 1–20). Burlington,VT:Ashgate Publishing. Jacknis, I. (1984). Franz Boas and photography. Studies in Visual Communication, 10(1), 2–60. Lutz, C., & Collins, J. (1993). Reading national geographic. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Markham, A. (2012). Fabrication as ethical practice. Information, Communication and Society, 15(3), 343–353. Murphy, K. M. (2016). Design and anthropology. Annual Review of Anthropology, 45, 433–449. Pink, S. (2001). Doing visual ethnography.Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Pinney, C. (2011). Exposures: Photography and anthropology. London: Reaktion. Powis, R. (2017). Heartened by iconoclasm. American Anthropologist, 119(2), 359–361. Steiner, M. (2005). Approaches to archaeological illustration. London: Council for British Archaeology.

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Samuel Gerald Collins and Matthew Durington Takaragawa, S., Smith,T. L., Hennessy, K., Alvarez Astacio, P., Chio, J., Nye, C., & Shankar, S. (2019). Bad habitus. American Anthropologist, 121(2), 517–524. Ventura, J., & Bichard, J.-A. (2016). Design anthropology or anthropological design? Towards ‘Social Design.’ International Journal of Design Creativity and Innovation 5(3-4): 1-13. Waltrop, K. (2017). Digital technologies, dreams and disconcertment in anthropological worldmaking. In J. Salazar, S. Pink, A. Irving, & J. Sjoberg (Eds.), Anthropologies and futures (pp. 101–116). New York, NY: Bloomsbury. Wang, T. (2013). Talking to strangers (Ph.D. dissertation). San Diego, CA: San Diego State University.

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PART 2

Applying and extending approaches and methodologies

Part 2 Introduction As discussed in the introduction to this book, ethnographic film and video often have interchangeable meanings, but at times the two concepts may refer to completely different products and research traditions. Chapters contained in Part 2 of this book present a few of the ways in which video-based research may in fact differ from the traditional notion of feature ethnographic documentary. Most of the methodological traditions discussed in this section debunk the notion that ethnographic film is a complete narrative and present video ethnography ethnographic videos as a companion to traditional written research. One of the oldest ways in which video has been used in research in a non filmic matter is discussed in Chapter 8 by Asta Cekaite.As Cekaite writes, ethnomethodologists have turned to video technologies to record social interactions for over half a decade.Their intention has never been to bring bums to movie theater seats, but instead to faithfully capture naturally occurring interactions for the sake of ethnomethodological theoretical advancement. Ethnomethodology relies on naturalistic research strategies and its practitioners go to painstaking lengths to ensure that research participants will act naturally, as if the cameras were not there. Throughout her chapter Cekaite offers a few practical tips on how to achieve that, and how to ensure that video recordings will be most valuable to ethnomethodologists and conversation analysts. In Chapter 9 Ryan and Staton focus on interactive documentaries featuring oral histories. Interactive documentaries differ significantly from the kinds of documentaries we watch in movie theaters or television because they depend on individuals watching alone or in small groups. Interactive documentaries, unlike linear narrative features, in fact demand the active participation of individual audience members and their navigation practices.The key advantage of an interactive documentary format for oral historians is that it allows for additional narrative material to be explored much more deeply than, say, 90 minutes would allow. Furthermore, interactive documentaries do not come with a narrative determined by the editor; the viewers themselves are essentially the editors.The i-doc therefore offers much value to oral history researchers, Ryan and Staton (this book) remark, including “story-driven narrative, narrator agency, academic contextualization, and user- and narrator-friendly archival storage in a single web-based platform.”

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The next chapter, by Lemelson and Tucker, brings the focus on linear narratives that are intended to compel audiences and move them. But as they explain, in the case of visual psychological anthropology the central reason for doing so is more than simply making films that allow people to relate to one another.Visual psychological anthropology’s focus on emotionality, subjectivity, and personal experiences function as key tools for the crafting of visual ethnographies that are both compelling and informed by the topics and insights of psychological anthropology as a field of study. Most ethnographic filmmakers fall in love with making movies because they love being behind the camera. But one does not need to be in control to make a film, and in her chapter Charlotte Bates offers an important production alternative: the video diary.Video diary methods are based on research participants filming themselves, either while doing something or while reflecting and speaking to the camera in intimately reflexive moments.This allows video diary researchers to go behind the scenes, as it were, to be in places that camera operators could hardly access.The tradeoff is obvious: in surrendering control of the camera(s) researchers are unable to “capture” and tell a story of their own making, but in allowing people to tell their own story, the research becomes more intimate, more democratic, and more sensitive to participants’ agency. Throughout her chapter Bates discusses several useful practical considerations for how such projects can be conducted. The last chapter in Part 2 is by Molly Merryman.As Merryman remarks, relatively few ethnographic film directors have openly embraced feminist and queer perspectives, but fortunately the trend is changing. Feminist and queer-theory based methodologies, which share commitments to democratic collaboration and inclusiveness, not only offer key blueprints for making films that shed light on issues of gender and sexuality, but also serve as key inspirations for ethnographic film in general.Throughout her chapter Merryman outlines the main characteristics and the central critiques that feminist and queer scholars have issued toward ethnographic filmmaking. As she observes, these critiques “address the erasure of feminist and queer subjects from ethnographic film/video and explore the absence of feminist and queer scholars from the small community of scholars who utilize ethnographic film/video-based methodologies” (Merryman, this book). As a whole, Part 2 touches on methodology without the pretense to generate a recipe, a methodological step-by-step set of instructions. Regardless of whether ethnographic filmmakers intend to generate a linear or a fragmented narrative, or whether they are even interested in creating a narrative at all, it is clear that the shape of film and video featuring ethnographic content is extremely diverse and contingent on theoretical considerations (or the lack thereof), disciplinary and sub-disciplinary concerns, available technologies, intended audiences, preferred media of dissemination, and the ultimate objectives of the producers and directors. Just like there is no complete, prescriptive, or normative definition of ethnographic film or video, there is no catch-all method, procedure, or design for its execution.

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8 ETHNOMETHODOLOGICAL APPROACHES Asta Cekaite

Ethnomethodological analysis comprises interdisciplinary work, including sociology, linguistics and pragmatics, educational sciences, anthropology, and other disciplines and fields.This approach uses video recordings in order to engage in a close analysis of social life, more specifically to investigate social actors’ embodied meaning-making and ordinary social practices that have a visual dimension. Initially a sociological tradition with origins in the 1950’s and Garfinkel’s work, ethnomethodology aimed to reframe the focus of sociological inquiry by directing attention to people’s actions as a foundation of fundamental social phenomena such as social order. Ethnomethodology as a sociological approach proposes a bottom-up perspective on how societies and cultures are accomplished. It has later expanded and become a heterogenous perspective and today it also associated with Ethnomethodological Conversation Analysis (EMCA) (Heath, 1986; Mondada, 2011), and Multimodal Interaction Analysis-based studies (Goodwin, C., 1994, 2000, 2018; Mondada, 2018) which utilize video recordings of everyday practices. According to Garfinkel, the founder of ethnomethodology, in order to “to see sociologically” one has to focus on the “routine details that comprise the coherence of activities” rather than beliefs and motives of people (Garfinkel, 2002, p. 6). Ethnomethodological investigation aims to describe social practices and social order as members’ concern, i.e., members’ social actions within particular social contexts and settings. Social order is achieved by engaging in practices in concerted co-presence with others and it is accomplished by members in the world of embodied and material practice (Garfinkel, 2002, p. 6; 1967). Participants recognize in detail what each other is doing and build one’s own and respond to each other’s actions, while orienting to and implementing the social order. The ethnomethodological approach has visuality, visibility, and public availability of endogenous social actions as a focus of exploration.Yet, differently from other sociological traditions, this approach assumes that visibility is a characteristic feature of the worldly character of social objects and social order (Garfinkel, 2002). Put simply, for persons who are “normally sighted” social action is inextricably interwoven with, and done through, visuality (Goodwin, C., 2018). For instance, one of the seminal findings of ethnomethodology, which is significant for microsociological and communicative understandings of human sociality, concerns Charles Goodwin’s analysis of mutual construction of an utterance in social interaction. Goodwin shows that basic and pervasive meaning-making procedures depend on interactants’ moment-by-moment visual displays of attention and gaze orientation to each other (1981). 83

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Because ethnomethodologists concern themselves with how the normality and social order of everyday life are achieved in the course of face-to-face social interactions, many studies are concerned with people’s tacit, taken-for-grated, common sensical resources for social action. Accordingly, objects of social inquiry are not individual’s experiences and intentions, but social actors’ actions and their characteristics, and collective procedures of social order, described by attending to the social actors’ endogenous, emic perspectives on social practices.These theoretical foundations have significant bearing on how social life is approached analytically: members’ situated meaning-making procedures and their continuous engagement in the production of social order are characteristically documented through video recordings of social practices.

Video recordings of social practices Various social perspectives utilize video recordings for research purposes in line with a broad interest in the visual (Pink, 2013; Rose, 2016). While the emergence of the analysis of video recordings follows a general interest in investigating social life, the ethnomethodological approach does not overlap with anthropological visual analysis sensory ethnography, or multimodal semiotic analysis. Rather, the ontological and epistemological concerns of ethnomethodology have strong methodological implications for the type of data and analytical procedures used. Ethnomethodological video-based approaches rely rigorously on several procedural steps pertaining to recording, transcription, and detailed analysis of locally situated and endogenous social order achieved through members’ social actions. In these approaches video is used as a ground for, and to support, the analysis of everyday activities. Video recordings and detailed transcripts are deployed by these studies to investigate and demonstrate social actors’ procedural and detailed accomplishment of social order. It is therefore pertinent to record activities that are not produced for the benefit of, or solicited and arranged by, researchers. Rather, video is used to record social interactions that occur in as much as possible authentic, emergent, and situated occurrences, unarranged by research practices. Focus is on observation, rather than on experiments or researcher-initiated meta-level events (e.g., social actors’ individual experiential portrayals and disclosures).Analytically, researchers adopt a so-called “non-ironical” stance and emic perspective, examining the participants’ own actions and orientations as the source of social meaning for themselves within their situated social activities (Garfinkel, 2002; Mondada, 2011).

Empirical work Pioneers of interactional video analysis Some of the pioneers of the video analysis of social interaction are Charles and Marjorie H. Goodwin. The Goodwins started videotaping mundane situations (e.g., stationary events such as family dinners) at the beginning of the 1970’s (Goodwin, C., 1981; Goodwin and Goodwin, 2004). The Goodwins also initiated video data sessions with colleague researchers (e.g., Gail Jefferson) and made their recordings available to others for analysis (for a detailed description of early development of video analysis, see Goodwin, M. and Cekaite, 2018).They engaged in detailed analytical description of embodied social interaction, tracing the step-by-step emergence and situated organization of the recorded social practices, and were the pioneers of the development of the analytical understanding of social embodied conduct. Through his career Charles Goodwin built the ground for ethnomethodological video analysis and his approach is now widely recognized across various disciplinary approaches. Charles and Marjorie Goodwin have developed a systematic and detailed approach to the study of social interaction and 84

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meaning-making as embodied, and not logocentric, i.e., solely based on language (Goodwin, C., 1994, 2000, 2018; Goodwin, M., 2006).Their work has inspired a rich interdisciplinary study of embodied conduct and social life. Ethnomethodological research has approached and explored a variety of social settings and topics. Some of the areas of investigation, which have been approached with video recordings, involve professional and scientific settings and constitute a field of so-called work place studies. Video recordings of work and interaction enable researchers to address a range of topics and issues such as how professional knowledge, skills, and work practices emerge and are shared between social actors. Researchers have explored professional activities such as medical consultations (Heath, 1986; Nishizaka, 2017); airport control rooms (Goodwin, C. and Goodwin, M., 1996), human-machine interaction (Brooker, Sharrock, and Greiffenhagen, 2018; Suchman, 1987), surgery (Mondada, 2011);TV studios and TV-production rooms (Perry et al., 2019); and auctions (Heath, 2013), to name a few. For instance, a study on “professional vision” by Charles Goodwin (1994) shows how professionals develop and use visual skills and materials (including video), in interpreting, evaluating, and highlighting visual information in professionally meaningful ways (e.g., archeologists use professional vision to categorize soil/dirt, or police officers evaluate the rightfulness of police violence).Video documentation also supports the ethnomethodological examination of learning practices in educational settings (Hester and Francis, 2000) and instructions as publicly observable practices in which knowledge is shared and disseminated (Ivarsson, 2017; Lindwall and Ekström, 2012; Melander, 2012). Furthermore, ethnomethodological studies have engaged in research in informal, mundane settings and leisure activities such as sports, driving environments, museum visits, children’s play and arguments, and family interactions (e.g., Evaldsson, 2003; Keisanen, Rauniomaa, and Siitonen, 2017; vom Lehn and Heath, 2016). Researchers do not only examine adults, but also direct their attention at children’s social worlds, play, and other kinds of embodied social interaction (Goodwin, M., 2006). For instance, mundane features of children’s social life such as the public visibility of girls’ hopscotch grid play was studied in relation to the negotiation of social order, hierarchies, rules, and moral accountability (Evaldsson, 2003; Goodwin, M., 2006). Furthermore, family interactions have been extensively documented by video recordings of family mealtimes (Hester and Hester, 2000; Keel, 2016), or family routines and chores (Goodwin, M. and Cekaite, 2018).These studies show how families, parents, and children achieve intimacy, family relations, care, and socialization through everyday interactions.

Seeing and documenting with a camera Within the ethnomethodological perspective, data collection through video recording necessitates for the identification of relevant activities, participants’ actions, and their socio-material settings and temporal features. Documenting and following the actions of participants is one of the key concerns for researchers and for this reason video recording is a reflexive practice that adjusts to the participants’ social actions (Heath et al., 2010).The emic, or participants’, perspective serves as a point of departure for researchers keen on finding where social action is and what to record.Attention to participants and their actions can successfully guide the selection of focal practices.As vividly put by C. Goodwin (2000: 1508) [r]ather than wandering onto field-sites as disinterested observers, attempting the impossible task of trying to catalogue everything in the setting, we can use the visible 85

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orientation of the participants as a spotlight to show us just those features of context that we have to come to terms with if we are to adequately describe the organization of their actions. Accordingly, video recordings are organized so that they take place in some kind of social setting where social practices occur.What is recorded is inextricably linked to the aims and interest of the social practice in focus, and to the technical qualities and limitations of available recording devices. Video records a version of social activities in real time and provides a perspectival visual and auditory record of the unfolding organization of conduct. Video recordings can capture multiple, embodied, and material features of talk and visible conduct such as gaze, gesture, facial expressions, body postures, touch, movements, and mobility.The richness of information contained in video recordings provides analysts with possibilities to consider the local spatial conditions and material ecologies inclusive of artifacts, objects, texts, screens, technologies, and ways in which they are used and incorporated in actions and activities (Goodwin, C., 1994, 2000; Mondada, 2016). Characteristic of ethnomethodological video-based research is the set-up of cameras—fixed or moving—as sensitive and responsive to the organizational logics of activities and ways in which practices are organized in everyday settings, such as schools, families, or workplaces (Goodwin, M. and Cekaite, 2018; Heath et al., 2010; Mondada, 2011). Video recordings can therefore be conceptualized as a form of videography which includes initial or simultaneous fieldwork. Notably, of course, the camera is not a neutral or objective device for documentation. As noted by C. Goodwin and many other researchers, the positioning and movements of the camera constitute a type of initial analysis of what is happening in interaction (i.e., what are members’ concerns in the social situation). Accordingly, following and documenting the social practices with a video camera is already a form of “proto-analysis” (Mondada, 2006). It is the researcher who is engaged in decision-making concerning what is significant and how to document it in the setting and in an ecologically valid way (Goodwin, M. and Cekaite, 2018). Fieldwork prior to recordings allows identification of both the social and the temporal and spatial organization of endogenous practices. In addition to the establishment of social rapport with the participants, and the building of ethnographic knowledge on the setting, fieldwork is necessary to prepare for good quality recordings, as it can provide an informed ground for decision-making about technological equipment (for instance, where to position cameras, how many cameras to use, and how to record both sound and visual information).Various social settings present specific conditions and challenges for video recordings and it can take significant efforts to find ways of recording high quality data (Heath et al., 2010). Depending on what kind of camera and ways of documenting social practices are used, various video accounts of social practices are produced, and researchers adopt various roles during the data recording process. Basically, video recordings within ethnomethodological research are done by using a fixed camera position, or a handheld camera. Some supplementary recordings can be done by using Go Pros, 360˚cameras, or even drones in order to record aerial spatial views. Handheld cameras are typically used in social settings where the researchers focus on specific participants, their action trajectories, and changing movements within the socio-material space. Recordings with handheld cameras have the advantage of recording activities that spontaneously shift locations and emerge in various locations, e.g., various rooms or different locations of the same room, as a part of the local ecology of social practice. Examples of such studies concern family everyday practices as they develop within the multiple rooms of a house (Cekaite, 2010; Goodwin, M. and Cekaite, 2018), children’s play on the school yard (Evaldsson, 2003; Goodwin, 86

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M., 2006), and various human mobility practices such as guided museum tours, assisted shopping, bicycle riding, and foraging activities/ activities in natural settings (Keisanen et al., 2017; Mondada, 2016). Handheld portable cameras are actively managed by researchers who move and follow participants. In these cases, the focus and movements of the camera and the actions of the researcher have to adjust to the ongoing actions and emergent practices of participants. Special ethnographic sensitivity and knowledge about the potential progression and organization of activities is necessary so that researchers can smoothly record the main features of emerging ongoing courses of action. Notably, handheld camera recordings are not only a matter of technical skill. Rather, the researcher adopts the active role of a camera person: a video-ethnographer who engages in ongoing negotiations and re-definitions of one’s role vis-à-vis the participants in the field. Ethnographic fieldwork and familiarity with the activities and participants prior to recordings is highly relevant because high quality recordings require subtle, and “on the spot” sensitivity of the camera movement.The researcher needs to be able to follow and to anticipate activities and their potential spatial shifts and transformations, and to engage in “the momentto-moment formulation of how to frame a shot” therefore taking into account relevant features of the local scene while getting people’s bodies and faces, so that later analysis of embodied, as well as affective dimensions of social life can be scrutinized (Goodwin and Cekaite, 2018). Fixed cameras are used as an alternative approach to video recordings and to the role adopted by the researcher. When a camera is placed in a fixed position, it utilizes a single perspective and a wide visual view of the social practice. Stationary cameras have been extensively used in workplace studies that document and examine the work of surgical teams, architects, subway operation rooms, and other settings that are characterized by complex technological environments and spatially concentrated work practices. To improve the quality of recordings and their analytical insights researchers can use multiple cameras to record the same event. In these cases, one camera captures the general arrangement of the activity (where and how are participants positioned and their embodied actions), while other cameras can be positioned so that they capture more specific and detailed aspects such as participants’ faces, documents, screens or drawings, specific participants or their groups (e.g., students collaborating at the same desk), or actions (surgeons’ hands, operation on body).Again, ethnographic fieldwork is needed to identify how to situate the cameras so that relevant aspects, such as bodies, faces, and movements of individuals, as well as material features of the environment are captured, and the flow of practices is not disturbed by researchers. The advantage of using multiple fixed cameras is that researchers do not need to be actively involved in the process of recording. Notably, even when multiple cameras with a fixed view on the specific social situation are used, their viewpoint is limited to the stationary position. Moreover, multiple cameras produce a wealth of data that have to be processed in order to be used productively in analysis. Data processing is certainly a time-consuming process and multiple recordings are usually used in cases, when some uncertainty occurs in interpreting a course of action, and clarification is needed, for instance, how participants use tools within a larger configuration of medical intervention, or what information is displayed on the monitor or computer screen at a particular moment of classroom work.

Camera influence on recorded data It is often assumed that the process of video recordings and the presence of camera have a considerable influence on the participants’ activities. Of course, for ethnomethodology and its interest in social life and participants’ naturally occurring actions, it is crucial to get recordings that 87

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capture people’s activities so that their ways of acting can be reconstructed. Researchers using this method argue nevertheless that a pervasive influence of cameras on participants’ actions cannot be taken for granted (e.g., Heath et al., 2010). Methodologically, moments in social interaction when participants explicitly orient to, comment to, or change their behavior toward the camera equipment, can be analyzed because they can also provide cues as to how to avoid similar occurrences. Similar to the reasoning of traditional ethnographic approaches, analysis of participants’ non-routinized actions visible in their orientation to the camera can actually reveal their tacit assumptions and common-sense procedures. Furthermore, the extended character of video recordings in itself can work to minimize the effects of a video camera. As argued by video-ethnographic researchers who conduct video-ethnographic recordings in families, workplaces or schools, participants do not orient themselves to the presence of cameras throughout an entire interaction process.While orientation to cameras commonly occur during lapses and less intensive moments, participants usually get immersed into the demands of their work, giving priority to the accomplishment of their everyday responsibilities in ways that are recognizable to co-present others (Goodwin, M. and Cekaite, 2018).

Permanence, replayability of video recordings, and their availability for secondary analysis The distinctive access to and permanence of video as visual and audio record has particular value regarding analytical procedures. It allows data to be replayed and transcribed in detail, and to be shared and viewed together with research colleagues.Video recordings of social practices enable a certain transparency of the analytical process and allow researchers to deflect the criticism that targets other research perspectives and methods that investigate human conduct. For instance, field-note based ethnography has been long criticized for giving other researchers limited access to data, thus raising difficulties in evaluating the quality of analysis. In contrast, within ethnomethodologically driven analysis, the detailed transcripts of video recorded events are presented and analyzed in full transparency, both during analysis and in publications.This generates the ground for researchers’ primary, and readers’ secondary analysis and critical scrutiny of findings. The permanence of video also allows for collaborative analytical work. A usual work procedure utilized as a collegial research activity within the Ethnomethodological Conversation Analytical community concerns presentation of video recordings and transcripts during data sessions, and, on the basis of the replays of video data, collegial scrutiny of tentative interpretations. In many journals, it is nowadays possible to upload video research material (if ethically approved) and thereby allow readers’ independent scrutiny of analysis. Moreover, analysis of video-recorded social practices can be argumentatively compelling for professionals and provide for a deeper understanding and improvement of everyday work practices, thus strengthening collaboration between research and practice.

Using video recordings in analysis: transcribing talk and embodied actions Analysis of audiovisual recordings from the ethnomethodological (and conversation analysis) perspective is guided by rigorous analytical procedures. Endogenous practices that are video recorded are transcribed and the ensuing detailed transcripts are scrutinized for the analysis of the temporally unfolding talk, embodied actions, and spatial conditions they reveal (Goodwin, C., 2000; Mondada, 2016). Detailed transcripts of participants’ actions are conducted on the basis of repeated viewings of recordings and detailed transcripts. This is because, according to ethnomethodological understanding, participants use various interactional resources to choreo88

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graph and arrange their meaning-making procedures, producing their actions accountably, and achieving shared “intelligibility” of their actions (Garfinkel, 2002). Within the Ethnomethodological Conversation Analytical strand, talk is transcribed and closely analyzed by adopting so-called participants’ perspectives. Participants’ perspectives are visible in verbal turn-taking and the sequential organization of talk (Sacks et al., 1974). Sequential organization implies that a particular contribution makes some actions “conditionally relevant,” thus indicating and constraining the range of possible next contributions.This creates basic conditions for participants’ meaning-making, i.e., intersubjectivity. By examining how participants orient to each other’s actions, turn-by-turn, analysts see evidence of how participants themselves interpret and analyze each other’s actions and accomplish social practices. Video recordings allow researchers to examine much more than talk alone.There is a growing number of ethnomethodologically inspired video-based research (sometimes referred to as multimodal interaction analysis) that pursues an endeavor to outline and uncover how embodied, multimodal communicative resources such as language, body posture, gaze, bodily configurations, gestures, and touch are coordinated and synchronized together to accomplish social actions and meaning-making. These studies demonstrate how embodied conduct is not organized in discrete turn units (as talk), but has different temporalities (Mondada, 2016).They propose that it is not talk as such, but the coordination of multiple resources within contextual configurations that establishes the participants’ sense actions, their activities, and cultures (Goodwin, C., 2000, 2018).

Examples I will now exemplify how multimodal interaction analysis is applied to video-recorded data collected as a part of my own and colleagues’ ethnomethodologically inspired video ethnography of families in the US and in Sweden (Goodwin, M. and Cekaite, 2018). Detailed analysis of ethnographic video recordings allowed us to examine much more than talk alone in the orchestration of activities situated within specific settings, including spaces in which families organized their daily life. Our study was conducted with the help of mobile, handheld cameras used by videographers who actively followed family members’ everyday routine and spontaneously emergent engagements in the spatial and material organization of their homes. Such participant oriented and action-sensitive organization of video recordings allowed us to document and discover novel, previously unnoticed routine characteristics of family life that played out across time and space; more specifically, it allowed a systematic and close study of embodied, affective, and spatial features of family members’ actions, talk, movements, and their corporeal contact. One of the discoveries made possible by a video ethnographic design and portable handheld cameras concerns the bodily techniques (Mauss, 1973) of “shepherding,” or embodied directives to get things done, as family members’ close corporeal ways for controlling children’s bodies and achieving their compliance (Cekaite, 2010; Goodwin, M. and Cekaite, 2018).Video recordings showed that adults used touch to steer and guide a child across familial space into accomplishing everyday tasks. Repeated viewings of video recordings of parents’ directives to children to do mundane tasks, such as to brush their teeth, go to bed, and similar activities, demonstrated that adults used routinized embodied ways of achieving social order in the family by using control touch to steer, or shepherd, children to the target activity relevant space. An analytical demonstration of embodied directive sequences that involve touch (haptic) practices can be summarized here. In Figure 8.1 we can see how late in the evening mom and daughter say goodbye to their guests and embrace each other. During this intimate bodily intertwining, Kristin (daughter) complains that she is tired. Mom, in her sequentially relevant verbal 89

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Figure 8.1 Embodied ‘shepherding.’

response launches a bed-going activity. Notably, mom’s verbal act does not stand alone. Rather, it is coordinated with her touch, and together they constitute an embodied directive, a so-called shepherding move. The use of video allows us to analytically extract and use frame grabs or line drawings to visualize and sequentially illustrate the participants’ actions. Here, we can see that Mom uses several embodied acts: she disengages from embrace, turns lightly the girl toward the bedroom door, and uses various kinds of “shepherding” touch to propel and bodily steer the girl’s movement purposefully and responsively to the daughter’s expression of tiredness. Such embodied directives and children’s responses are documented both in Swedish and American families. Arguably, they present cultivated forms of engagement that accomplish socialization, the work of being a family, and parent-child’s care for one another (Goodwin, M. and Cekaite, 2018: 35). Ethnomethodological video analysis engages with the general interest in language, body, and sensoriality found in a variety of disciplines (Classen, 2012;Vannini,Waskul, and Gottschalk, 2013) and the Ethnomethodological Conversation Analytic studies. It does so by using video recordings of naturally occurring activities and detailed and systematic procedures whose analysis can contribute to an understanding of human action as involving multiple modalities and senses.Analytical attention to the multiple modalities documented in video recordings of naturally occurring activities constitutes a particular challenge:“The challenges of multimodality require a careful analytical focus and consequently a detailed and precise temporal annotation in transcripts on complex sequential arrangements of multiple resources, in time,” according to Mondada (2016, p. 362). I will now show how multimodal interaction analysis can be used to explore social situations of multisensoriality and topics, which traditionally have been considered as a matter for 90

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psychologic research. In Figure 8.2, drawn from a video ethnography of daily preschool interactions in Sweden, we can see how Anna (five years old) hurts her foot and starts crying. Crying implicates moral accountability and makes conditionally relevant a response: the teacher envelops the child into comforting touch while using soothing sounds (lines 2, 4, 6).The temporality and coordination of various multimodal actions are analytically important and transcripts are adapted to represent details of talk and embodied actions. Here, we are particularly interested in how comforting touch is used to engage the child in embodied compassion. An adult’s comforting embrace, configured as a close bodily (head-to-head) sustained formation, enables the suspension of requirements for here-and-now conversational participation on the part of the crying child, embodies compassion through enveloping touch, and serves as a rich sensorial resource that can alleviate the child’s distress. Talk has been transcribed using the conventions developed by Gail Jefferson. Original talk in Swedish is provided in regular type; translation in italics.The meaning of symbols is: [ indicates overlapping talk; [(( initial point of movements or actions; @ onset of embracing formation; @@ indicates endpoint of embracing formation; # indicates the point where screen shot has been taken; : indicates 0.2 second length of a crying token; talk in italics indicate translation from Swedish to English.

Figure 8.2 Embodied comforting.

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Figure 8.2 Continued.

The teacher directs her attention to the crying child, Anna, who intensifies rather than decreases her crying (lines 1–3) and her crying occasions the teacher’s amplified embodied and vocal comforting response (line 2). The caregiver arranges a close embracing (head-to-head) formation (Cekaite and Kvist, 2017), using close bodily contact to embody her empathy and alignment with the child’s distress.The caregiver coordinates the close embrace with vocal and verbal resources, producing talk and vocalizations close to Anna’s ear (lines 4, 6, 8).The repetitive and melodic soft summonses (“listen listen Anna Anna Anna”) are adapted to the child’s unceasing monotonous crying which maintains a fundamental frequency of about 300Hz (average for a 5-year-old child 250–275Hz).The caregiver’s talk is adapted so that it does not overlap with the child’s crying. It is mostly produced in the clear and she invites the child’s nonverbal compliance to close her eyes (“try to close your eyes for a while,” lines 6, 8). Multimodal interaction analysis of this mundane and recurrent social situation of distress manifested as crying reveals highly emotional moments and embodied meaning-making procedures; more specifically, it describes how the child’s crying is configured and ratified by the adult as the social actor’s main and embodied involvement, as the child’s engulfing bodily experience. For instance, the adult topically requests the child to take a visual time-out from the activities of the surrounding world (lines 6, 8). Paradoxically, detailed analysis shows that comforting activity and being comforted requires social attunement between both participants. Such bodily attunement is manifested as the distressed person’s receptive engagement in soothing: the adult solicits the child’s bodily reliance on the stability of her support and also exerts some bodily control, while the child receives the stability of the adult’s comforting touch. Analytically, it is also important to note temporality as the onset and duration of the embracing formation: embrace is deployed in response to the child’s intensification of crying and is sustained for some time.

Conclusion In all, examples of the detailed multimodal interaction analyses of mundane and seemingly simple social encounters show that everyday social order involves corporeal accountabilities and multiple modalities and sensorial experiences of social actors. Social actors engage with each other in meaningful ways by configuring multiple resources, organizing them sequentially, and through corporeal micro-adjustments to each other’s bodily actions. Further possibilities of how video recordings of naturally occurring daily practices can be utilized involve the exploration of how participation in social life is accomplished by embodied subjects who mutually adjust to 92

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each other, explore the world, act, and move through time and space in an embodied intersubjective way.Video recordings of mundane interactions make observable for the analyst ways in which “situated embodied practices are the locus in which broader issues relative to language, body, cognition, action, culture, knowledge, social relations and identities, spatiality and temporality are temporally shaped, and implemented” (Mondada, 2016, p 362). In concluding, ethnomethodological video-making is unique in its orientation toward attaining and using video recordings of social life with the aim to study social interaction and meaning-making between embodied subjects acting within the socio-material world. Video ethnographic data enable researchers to use “a microscope of social life,” that is, to engage in the detailed analysis of social interaction.This approach requires researchers’ complex understanding of social practices, reflexivity about the researchers’ and camera’s role, and complex technological and film-making skills in trying to capture mundane, and therefore, primordial features of social life.

References Brooker, P., Sharrock,W., & Greiffenhagen, C. (2019). Programming visuals, visualising programs. Science and Technology Studies, 32, 1–42. Cekaite,A. (2010). Shepherding the child: Embodied directive sequences in parent-child interactions. Text and Talk, 30(1), 1–25. Cekaite, A., & Holm Kvist, M. (2017). Haptic responses to crying.Touch and emotion regulation in children’s distress. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 50, 109–127. Classen, C. (2012). The deepest sense:A cultural history of touch. Illinois: University of Illinois Press. Evaldsson, A.-C. (2003).Throwing like a girl? Situating gender differences in physicality across game contexts. Childhood, 10, 475–497. Garfinkel, H. (1967). Studies in ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Garfinkel, H. (2002). Ethnomethodology’s program:Working out Durkheim’s aphorism. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Goodwin, C. (1981). Conversational organization: Interaction between speakers and hearers. New York, NY: Academic Press. Goodwin, C. (1994). Professional vision. American Anthropologist, 96 (3), 606–633. Goodwin, C., & Goodwin, M. (1996). Seeing as a situated activity: Formulating planes. In P. Engeström & D. Middleton (Eds.), Cognition and communication and work. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goodwin, C. (2000). Action and embodiment within situated human interaction. Journal of Pragmatics, 32, 1489–1522. Goodwin, C. (2018). Co-operative action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goodwin, C., & Goodwin, M. H. (2004). Participation. A companion to linguistic anthropology. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. Goodwin, M. H. (2006). The hidden life of girls: Games of stance, status, and exclusion. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Goodwin, M. H., & Cekaite, A. (2018). Embodied family choreography. Practices of control, care and creativity. London: Routledge. Heath, C. (1986). Body movement and speech in medical interaction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heath, C., Hindmarsh, J., & Luff, P. (2010). Video in qualitative research: Analysing social interaction in everyday life. London: Sage. Heath, C. (2013). The dynamics of auction: Social interaction and the sale of fine art and antiques. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hester, S., & Francis, D. (Eds.). (2000). Local educational order: Ethnomethodological studies of knowledge in action. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Ivarsson, J. (2017).Visual expertise as embodied practice. Frontline Learning Research, 5, 12–27. Keel, S. (2016). Socialization. Parent-child interaction in everyday life. London: Routledge. Keisanen,T., Rauniomaa, M., & Siitonen, P. (2017).Transitions as sites of socialization in family interaction outdoors. Learning, Culture and Social Interaction, 14, 24–37. Lindwall, O., & Ekström,A. (2012). Instruction-in-interaction:The teaching and learning of a manual skill. Human Studies, 35, 27–49.

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Asta Cekaite Mauss, M. (1973).Techniques of the body. Economy and Society, 2, 70–88. Melander, H. (2012). Knowing how to play the game of jump rope: Participation and stancetaking in a material environment. Journal of Pragmatics, 44, 1434–1456. Mondada, L. (2006).Video recording as the reflexive preservation and configuration of phenomenal features for analysis. In H. Knoblauch, B. Schnettler, J. Raab, & H.-G. Soeffer (Eds.), Video analysis: Methodology and methods. Bern: Lang. Mondada, L. (2011). The organization of concurrent courses of action in surgical demonstrations. In J. Streeck, C. Goodwin, & C. LeBaron (Eds.), Multimodality in communication (pp. 207–226). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mondada, L. (2016). Challenges of multimodality: Language and the body in social interaction. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 20, 336–366. Mondada, L. (2018). The multimodal interactional organization of tasting: Practices of tasting cheese in gourmet shops. Discourse Studies, 20, 743–769. Nishizaka, A. (2017). The perceived body and embodied vision in interaction. Mind, Culture, and Activity, 24, 110–128. Perry, M., Broth, M. Engström ,A., & Juhlin , O. (2019).Visual narrative and temporal relevance: Segueing instant replay into live broadcast TV. Symbolic Interaction, 42, 98–126. Pink, S. (2013). Doing visual ethnography. London: Sage. Rose, G. (2016). Visual methodologies (4th ed.). London: Sage. Sacks, H., Schegloff, E.A., & Jefferson, G. (1974).A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking for conversation. Language, 50(4), 696–735. Suchman, L. (1987). Plans and situated actions: The problem of human-machine communication. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vannini, P.,Waskul, D., & Gottscahlk, S. (2013). The senses in self, society, and culture: A sociology of the senses. Oxford: Routledge. vom Lehn, D., & Heath, C. (2016).Action at the exhibit face:Video and the analysis of social interaction in museums and galleries. Journal of Marketing Management, 32, 1441–1457.

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9 ORAL HISTORY, VISUAL ETHNOGRAPHY, AND THE INTERACTIVE DOCUMENTARY Kathleen M. Ryan and David Staton

“Tell me a story,” is the plea of the oral historian to the narrator.Those stories are powerful, at times becoming what Walter Benjamin (1969) called mémoire involuntaire: memories lodged in our brains despite our efforts to the contrary. Oral historians, as Donna Harraway (1988) notes, must come “to terms (that) the agency of the ‘objects’ studied is the only way to avoid gross error and false knowledge” (pp. 592–593). However, oral history also has another demand: publication or an active insertion into the public sphere beyond the traditional archive.The interactive documentary, or i-doc, is one way to achieve this goal. As Judith Aston (2016) notes, the format allows for user engagement and participation of an almost-encyclopedic amount of data housed in a navigable virtual space, demonstrating a type of “embodied interaction” (n.p.). If the analog documentary is a linear story with a pre-ordained beginning, middle, and end, the i-doc allows the user to “play” the story, navigating between ideas, people, and things in a nonlinear manner.The order of the elements is less important than the stories that are being told. In some ways the i-doc producer and director are attempting to behave like Toto in the classic Hollywood film The Wizard of Oz. In a scene toward the end of the film, Dorothy and her friends stand before the Wizard in a green-hued great room.They have returned from a successful mission to destroy the Wicked Witch of the West, and are seeking their reward.As the Wizard hems and haws, attempting to renege on his promised gifts, Dorothy’s dog Toto creeps over to a green curtain.As the dog tugs the curtain aside, a small, unimposing man is revealed, working an elaborate control panel.“Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain,” the Wizard intones— though, of course, it is evident to Dorothy and her friends (as well as the audience) that the man behind the curtain is the Wizard himself. By pulling back the metaphorical curtain on the storytelling process, the i-doc producer and director are allowing viewers/users to see behind the “curtain” and point out the artificiality of the idea of story/narrative construction within documentary practice. Instead, the storytelling power and agency are potentially transferred to participants who traditionally have little or no editorial power: story narrators and users.The creator, narrators, and viewers share authority in the i-doc. This chapter explores an i-doc (www.pinupthemovie.com) and how the producer and director have made conscious choices to achieve narrator agency. In the project, many of the women self-identify as feminist and claim that pin up offers them feelings of empowerment.The i-doc 95

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allows for robust exploration of these claims. Unlike the traditional documentary, where the bulk of interviews end up on the virtual cutting room floor, interactive storytelling allows for the inclusion of full archival interviews embedded alongside traditional edited stories.We argue that the i-doc offers much potential for visual ethnographers: story-driven narrative, narrator agency, academic contextualization, and user- and narrator-friendly archival storage in a single web-based platform.

Oral history versus visual ethnography Oral history, while methodologically related to ethnographic research, exists in a tense relationship with ethnography.True, both talk about a “thickening” process that occurs in the collaboration between scholars and members of a culture (Geertz, 1973; Portelli, 1998), and both use interviews with cultural members as the backbone of research. But oral history and ethnography are not the same.As Ryan (2015) has discussed previously, the relationship between the two can be fraught. Oral history uses the concept of a “shared authority” (Grele, 2006), or a negotiation between participants and the scholar as to how the life history is framed, how the stories gathered are interpreted, or even the continued participation of those sharing their life history in a project/archive (participants can withdraw at any time).The person sharing their oral history is considered a “narrator” of their life story, an acknowledgment that they not only are in control of their life history, but that their specific knowledge gives them the authority to theorize about the historical and cultural events they experience (Portelli, 1998).The conversations should be rich and detail-laden, supported by personal analysis by the narrators. Oral history calls this concept “thick dialogue” (Portelli, 1998), borrowing from the ethnographic idea of “thick description” (Geertz, 1973). But there is a key difference: the narrator holds agency over how her story is told, while within ethnographic work the self-reflexivity of the researcher is key. Ethnographic thick description shifts the burden of analysis from the shared authority, to a more unilateral approach to scholarship. Informants in ethnography are considered knowledgeable situated agents, but are not expected to offer the philosophical analysis of the event studied: this is the domain of the scholar conducting the research. This split is often echoed in the academy, where oral history projects frequently are exempt from university oversight via Institutional Review Boards. In the United States (where the authors of this chapter both live and work), research is considered “a systematic investigation, including research development, testing, and evaluation, designed to develop or contribute to generalizable knowledge” (Protection of Human Subjects, 2018).As of January 2017, oral history was defined as an “explicit carve-out of activities from the definition of research” (Menikoff, 2017, p. 7240). Because of its shared authority and specific focus on the personal stories of the narrators, oral history is considered akin to journalism, documentary, and other non-research scholarly activities. It is its non-universality that makes it exempt from institutional oversight. Ethnographic research, with its grounding in the anthropological tradition, is not accorded the same exemption. Both oral history and visual ethnography share something more than a methodological approach. Each also demands that the research project have some sort of outcome visible to the larger public—projects cannot exist only in an archive or scholarly journals. But this demand comes with its own set of problems and issues, especially when made manifest in the documentary format. For the visual ethnographer, the question becomes how to incorporate transparency within the filmmaking process itself, demonstrating to potential audiences that a cameraperson, producer, director, editor, etc. are all involved in creating a representation of “reality” (Hermer, 2009).This can include such techniques as incorporating elements that call attention to the fact 96

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that the filmmaker was present: the dip of a boom mic, wild sound from an off-camera discussion, etc. For the oral historian, the idea of a complete “shared authority” would potentially extend to the finished product itself, offering narrators a preview screening or edit approval. This can be profoundly disorienting to the researcher trained in the documentary or journalistic tradition, where the authorial authority is valued.

Disrupting the documentary tradition The merger of oral history with documentary is nothing new. Oral histories are frequently used as a storytelling tool within non-academic nonfiction films. Tom Brokaw’s The Greatest Generation was both a book and documentary film; the former NBC News anchor used oral histories to tell stories of average Americans who came of age during World War II. The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter was originally broadcast on public television in the United States. Connie Field’s documentary told the stories of women who went to work on the factory production line during World War II, and has been selected for preservation by the National Film Registry at the Library of Congress in the United States because of its significance. In the Academy Award-nominated Harlan County USA, director Barbara Kopel follows the families impacted by a coal miner’s strike over unionization in Kentucky in 1973.The National Public Radio (NPR) StoryCorps project invites people to interview family members. Excerpts from the interviews are broadcast on NPR’s news programming, and are also produced for a website as animated videos.The interviews are archived at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. But in all of these examples, despite the grounding in oral history methodology, the projects may do a disservice to the intent of oral history.The interviews are edited, with verbal stutters such as “uh” or “like” removed and off-topic ramblings condensed (when included at all). Even more specifically, the goal of the “shared authority” of oral history may be outweighed by the commercial or narrative demands of a feature documentary project. Typically, and traditionally, those demands flow in a fairly rigorous, formulaic fashion. This standby, which Rabinger (2009) dubs “a contract with the audience” (p. 21), guides not only documentary production, but novels, stage plays, and Hollywood feature films, as the three-act dramatic structure.The format dates back to Aristotle’s Poetics; in more common parlance, it is known as Freytag’s pyramid.This storytelling shape relies on: exposition, an initial incident, rising action, climax, falling action, resolution, and dénouement in linear fashion. Structure works in response to the viewer’s built-in expectations, writes Bernard (2011).“There’s no such thing as a lack of structure,” (p. 51) she contends. In other words, it is expected that the documentary “story” will have a beginning, a middle, and an end.That framework is the expression of authorial control. But what happens to documentary film when, as is in the case of oral history, some authority is ceded? What happens when a filmmaker begins to experiment with format, to hybridize the expression of the documentary though a marriage of film and web-based storytelling? Or, to put it more succinctly, what happens to visual documentary storytelling when there is no expectation of a traditional narrative arc? These questions arise when a documentary moves from the filmic structure (an edited story designed to be viewed in one sitting and/or in a linear fashion) to something that is less structured and that offers less authorial control. It is a challenging experiment—and something that is not entirely new to us.As filmmakers and scholars we are frustrated with the idea that stories are left out of our projects, discarded on the proverbial cutting room floor because they do not serve the overall story arc. In our previous project, Homefront Heroines: The WAVES of World 97

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War II (2012), we gathered more than 50 oral histories.They were all female military veterans who had served in either the United States Navy or Coast Guard. But when we began film production we cut down the number of interviewees to less than ten, and even some of those ended up being discarded from the feature documentary. We crafted two solutions to this problem. In the feature film, we used what we dubbed a “Greek chorus” effect: the voices of several additional women, unidentified and off camera, talked about key themes that emerged during the oral history interviews. Our thought was that the multiple layered voices allowed the viewer to understand that other women theorized similarly about the impact of their naval military service.We used a consistent audio cue, a specific piece of music combined with a montage of voices from the oral history interviews, to help signal to viewers that the “Greek chorus” was starting. Each segment was covered with historical video or archival photos. The second solution was to create a non-filmic experience related to the project (www. homefrontheroines.com). The website included mini video profiles about the women interviewed for the overall oral history project, and features about common experiences using multiple voices embedded in pages with information about the uniforms, boot camp, etc.We were also able to include interviews with scholars whose expertise included military history, women’s history, fashion, propaganda, and World War II; like the narrators, some of these scholars had been interviewed but not included in the documentary film. We are working with the plugin Oral History Metadata Synchronizer (OHMS) to embed full oral histories, transcripts, and indexes within the website as well. The site is an information-rich repository, designed in many ways to sate curiosity and share knowledge and experience. However, having completed our next project, Pin Up! The Movie (2015), a feature-length documentary about contemporary pin up culture, we sought additional augmentation; we wanted to not only sate, but create curiosity.We wanted to embrace not just the notion of agency in our subjects, but accord viewers the same.We sought out a boundless structure, one that would add expansive dimensionality to Freytag’s pyramid. The interactive documentary, or i-doc, provided that vehicle.

Viewer agency, gamification, and interactivity Practitioners and theorists of the i-doc consider it an evolving process and product which, in large part, eludes definition. Aston, Sandra Gaudenzi, and Mandy Rose (2017) cast a wide net in attempting to describe the practice:“our definition of i-docs is deliberately open ended.We embrace any project that starts with the intention to engage with the real, and that uses digital interactive technology to realise this intention” (p. 1). In these projects, co-creation via interactivity is essential; the audience or viewer is central to its development, not adherence to narrative structure.The viewer acts as the engine that propels the narrative. To ground this abstraction in something tangible, it is helpful to think of the Netflix 2018 interactive feature, Bandersnatch. In this fictional effort, viewers are prompted on screen to choose various actions for protagonists, from the banal (what breakfast cereal to eat) to the bloody (whether to kill someone).The viewer uses a remote control to make a selection, and is given options to return to crucial decision points if the selection outcome is unsatisfactory. In such fashion, more than a trillion possible story combinations exist as viewers create their own adventure. However, despite all these permutations, Bandersnatch contains just five possible story conclusions. It remains wedded to Freytag’s pyramid. In i-docs, the point of view is typically lensed through the eyes of the individual, not that of a fictional protagonist. It is a first-person perspective delivered through a web-based platform 98

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that, in many regards, mimics game play. Users gain access to story elements only after viewing certain segments, or only learn about certain elements of the documentary’s subject matter by doing a deep dive into individual topic threads—which may or may not be necessary for a working understanding of the overall subject. If the strategies sound familiar, they should. Gamification applies “game-related elements to nongame contexts” (Basten, 2017, n.p.), in an effort to enhance usability, gain trust, and increase motivation for users. Dirk Basten (2017, n.p.) argues that “playful experiences help make nongame scenarios more motivating and engaging,” and says that users tend to fall into two categories: explorers who want to find hidden “Easter eggs” and achievers who want to complete all the challenges/story lines available. Craig Hight calls the nonlinear web-based documentary “a radical departure from the norms of continuity and evidentiary editing that are central to an analogue-based ‘commonsense’ appreciation of documentary form,” but adds that it raises a key question: “how does the creation of pathways through database-centered content relate to the creation of narrative and argument that are of such central concern to documentary practice?” (2008, p. 6). Thus, the i-doc is not necessarily seeking one of five pre-ordained conclusions a la Bandersnatch (which itself argues that viewer choice is just an illusion), but instead is attempting to pull back the curtain and transform the notion of “playing” a film. In the i-doc it is not enough to simply press the “play” button and watch.The format, when done well, demonstrates the research that goes into the documentary itself. It allows viewers the option to wander off into side tangents and spend as much—or as little—time with the topic as desired.The director and producer do not determine when the story ends: that is ultimately up to the user. These projects rely on connected viewers and participants. As i-docs innovator Katerina Cizek, the co-creator of Highrise, notes, the productions “make quality media with partners instead of just about them” (2017, p. 39). In Prison Valley (2010), David Dufresne and Philippe Brault examine the prison-industrial complex during recession-era America.Viewers (players) can interview a journalist, a sheriff, or a prison guard, join in online debates, or send emails to characters in the story. Part immersion journalism, part documentary film, part game, that spirit also informs Dufresne’s Fort McMoney (2013), in which the ethics and economics of oil sand development in Fort McMurray, Alberta is interrogated by an outsider (the viewer). Some two thousand hours of film was produced in the making of the project, offering a plethora of outcomes. “Fort McMoney does not want to moralize,” writes Kate Nash, “it’s the players themselves who, through their actions, develop their moral sense” (2017, p. 14).

Pin Up! The Interactive Documentary: a case study Pin Up! The Movie was not edited from two thousand hours of film; though our small crew may have felt that way. Nonetheless, after editing was completed for the feature-length documentary, we believed many voices and many avenues for investigation had been left out.To orient readers, pin up is a global subculture of mostly women who dress in vintage style clothing and makeup. The documentary followed pin ups, photographers, and fashion designers in two locations: Southern California and Colorado’s Front Range. Its story arc was familiar to documentary and film viewers, following a typical sports or contest formula (think a low-budget Koran by Heart or When We Were Kings). One group of women was competing to win the crown at a 1940’s-style ball, and the other was seeking to work with a prominent photographer to be published in a magazine. In other words, the stories centered around contests and competing: developing audience empathy with the participants, learning who won (and who lost), and following up 99

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in a third act coda that updated what happened to the film’s main participants after the contest ended or publication occurred. It was also a completely artificial construct.The director (Ryan) coordinated with the photographer for the Southern California shoot, scheduling a hair and makeup instruction session as a casting call, and letting participants know that one or two would have a chance to be followed in a documentary.The photographer had a previously established relationship with the magazine to publish a group of her photos every month. For the Colorado story line, the director worked with the contest organizer to pre-identify four participants. While the four were followed the day of the contest, the rest of their stories were shot weeks and months after the event. We knew the “winners” of both story arcs before the bulk of the video was shot, and structured our documentary accordingly. But as we dove deeper, we recognized that the film could not do justice to the subculture’s global aspects. The film featured, for the most part, two geographic locations; its shoestring budget (roughly $50,000) prohibited travel to other locales. As a result, before the feature film had been edited, we decided to experiment with the i-doc format to focus on the more global aspects of the story. Pin Up! The Interactive Documentary had a beta launch in 2017, with a full launch scheduled for 2020. We cast the i-doc using the social media platform Instagram, holding a year-long contest where the audience (mostly pin ups) could vote for who should advance. A rotating panel of judges finalized the selections. Some months we had two winners, because of an audience or judges’ tie in voting. In others, we offered pin ups a chance to “take over” the film’s Instagram account in exchange for a feature in the i-doc. More than 250 women and men entered the contest.We ended up casting pin ups from every continent but Antarctica, with the bulk coming from English-speaking countries. Because the stories were going to be on the web, we opted to take a looser approach with regards to production aesthetics and standards.We did not have external funding in place for the i-doc; two crowdfunding campaigns and a small grant were the extent of money we received for the project. So we opted to experiment with online video calling features to record the interviews. For the most part, the audio and video quality was strong.The interviews were sometimes shot in a widescreen horizontal orientation, but others were shot vertically, handheld on a cell phone.We did not correct our narrators; for us the vertical orientation seemed more authentic for phone-based video interviews.This allowed us more creativity when editing stories, with the ability to tile photographs or graphic effects alongside the narrator. The i-doc provided a platform to share people, places, and ideas without the burden of a prescribed narrative, though there most certainly was an intricate plan to connect individuals and story.We used the online gaming platform Twine to develop our basic i-doc storyboard.Twine’s rudimentary interface lets users create their own games (i.e., choosing between options). For us, it allowed insight into the results of those choices.We could see when a choice ended up in a dead end, or when a choice would result in the user traveling in a circular pattern.The Twine i-doc storyboard resembles a very large, complex spider’s web (see Figure 9.1). To develop the website, the project used the content management system (CMS) RacontR, which was developed from the backbone of projects like Prison Valley and Fort McMoney. The CMS code facilitates creating interactive hot spots on the screen. This allows the film to jettison the drop down menu format that we used in our previous project for true interactivity. Videos and other elements are fully embedded into the site, and there is an option to export the HTML package to privately hosted sites (content creators can also leave the i-doc on the RacontR pages for hosting). If the Twine version of the project resembles a spider’s web, the back end of the RacontR version is a spider’s web on steroids (see Figure 9.2).The mishmash of 100

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Figure 9.1 Twine. Kathleen M. Ryan and David Staton.

linked elements illustrates how viewers can dip in and out of one of an ever-growing number of stories within the larger project (part of the beauty, and frustration, of the i-doc is to know when enough is enough; when do you stop adding to the collection of rabbit holes?). The interface places the viewer within a boudoir filled with various amenities. Interacting with these—a dressing table, a radio, a television set—allows for exploration of the project. Interested in the fashion and glam side of the story? Click on the vanity to learn how to create the perfect victory roll. Concerned with contemporary, celebrity manifestations of the culture? Dive into stories and video performances via a vintage radio.Want to learn more about a particular pin up from another part of the globe? You can explore her musings and motivations by clicking on the map on the wall. There’s no overarching story formation and for that reason, there’s no hierarchy or privileging; the rockabilly section is accorded equal importance as the roller derby component as is the hair and makeup how-tos. More importantly, there is no passivity. The user must interact with the various elements on the screen in order to learn more about the subculture.The stories do not have to follow a narrative because they are their own self-contained narrative; each two to five minute segment has its own story arc before linking to other, related, stories.The website is fluid, evolving, and accords agency to the user. There is no overall “ending” to the i-doc because the i-doc itself intentionally rejects linear narrative structures.

Problems (and potential) in emerging technology For i-docs producers, this can be a liberating exercise, but it does not come without some constraints. For us, the constraints were most evident when we followed oral history protocol in the online project. Each person was asked to provide photographs or videos to help tell her story, and each was allowed to view her story after it was edited. For the most part no one asked for changes, or the changes requested were minor. But one, a white pin up based in South Africa, asked that we rework a section in her story when we talked about black South African pin ups in the subculture. She worried that a regional word choice (the use of the term “coloured” to refer to pin ups of mixed race or from multiple ethnic heritages) could be seen as anachronistic or offensive to someone from outside of South Africa.We removed the term. Another woman broke up with her wife during the production; we are working with her to create a revised story that reflects her newly single status. But this raises another question: in the case of a story that rejects a traditional narrative structure with no overall beginning, middle, or end, how does a producer or director know when the 101

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RacontR. Kathleen M. Ryan and David Staton.

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story is “done”? Of course, all projects may have issues with completion, especially in academic circles where a premiere screening date may not be set in stone.There is always one more interview, one more artifact that could make the project “better” or at the very least “more complete.” But unlike the traditional documentary, where one has that tangible “thing” in the format of a film exhibited in film festivals/academic conferences or distributed (independently or via a contractual agreement), the i-doc can potentially be published and updated an infinite number of times. It can be difficult to determine when one can legitimately say “enough.” Is it when the funding for a project runs out? When the creative team gets bored with the subject matter? When one reaches an arbitrary deadline, such as a tenure and promotion review? Our solution has been to have an initial beta test publication followed by an official publication. Other projects do periodic updates. Highrise, initially launched in 2010, did a series of updates over the following five years, including a collaboration with the New York Times, a 360° documentary Out My Window, before culminating in a live performance at Hot Docs in Toronto in 2015. This raises a related issue: the project’s cost. A sophisticated, layered, detailed project like Highrise demanded a group of high end innovative risk takers as investors, including the National Film Board of Canada and the Times. That sort of support may not be available to a smaller production. For Pin Up! The Interactive Documentary, we relied on a negotiated licensing fee with RacontR, paid for by one of our home institutions. A graduate student developed the boudoir as part of his research assistant assignment; undergraduates assisted with the shooting and editing process, funded in part by university grants to engage students in research. But without this sort of institutional support, our project would not be completed. Embedded into the definition of i-doc is another challenge: emerging and evolving technology. It is, notes Hight (2017), a co-creator: “At a fundamental level, we are collaborating with programming code when we engage with, respond to, or create content using an application or platform” (2017, p. 72). Simply put, the speed of change has changed; seemingly each week there’s a game-changing new software application or technological breakthrough for filmmakers to consider. Software (or technology) is very much an actant in the filmmaking process. For the i-doc this is further complicated by what “interactive” means. Mixed reality encompasses a range of technologies, from online interactive to augmented or virtual reality. But even these different platforms are not clean-cut.When one talks about augmented reality (AR), does it refer to geotagging objects in the “real” world with digital stories, such as in The Story of the Forest exhibition at the National Museum of Singapore, where users capture images to learn more about the plants and animals in the paintings? Or is it like the app 321 Launch, where users watch space rocket launches from Cape Canaveral in Florida in real time, digitally projected into a home or office? Virtual reality (VR) similarly offers a multitude of options, from simple 360 video, scrollable on a laptop, to fully immersive headset-based experiences. As filmmakers, we struggle with balancing the potential of the multitude of platform options, our desires to explore the technologies, and the realization that we cannot be an expert in every new technological innovation. Each platform impacts storytelling in different ways. At the 2018 i-docs Conference in Bristol, we came to the realization that is it okay to acknowledge that one or two individuals may not be able to successfully produce immersive online,AR, and VR content at the same time. If a project demands multiple platforms, multiple producers may be necessary. In this sense—technology as an actant or co-creator—innovation can become friend or foe. As Lev Manovich (2001) noted, new technologies can disrupt narrative and create new forms in its forceful wake. In a prescient sense, Manovich wrote about the format these new media object might take:“Many new media objects do not tell stories; they don’t have beginning or end. … Instead, they are collections of individual items, where every item has the same significance as any other” (p. 218). His ideas echo the embodiment of the contemporary i-doc. 103

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In our explorations, the new narrative possibilities within the i-doc allow us to solve some of the issues that trouble us about traditional documentary.To be specific, we can avoid the trap of the “voice of god” scripting format, where a narrator offers details and contextualization and helps to shape the narrative arc. Because the i-doc is not limited by the time constraints (fitting into a standard television, classroom, or film festival time slot), it can present the stories of individuals in their own voices without commentary, while adding elements such as an embedded production blog or other pages clearly identified as being in the voice of the filmmaker. Choices made within the filming process, struggles or conflicts, and even the overall themes found within the interviews can be explained and discussed there, using either academic or more colloquial language.The i-doc offers the ability to include full interviews, transcripts, user-generated content, and other information gathered within research and shooting. In other words, the i-doc allows visual ethnographers and oral historians the ability to make their choices obvious—and allows audiences to come to the same or other conclusions via individual exploration. Ceding authority to both the narrators and viewers, makes the scholarship process more transparent. Far from showing a bumbling Wizard attempting to control experiences, pulling back the curtain within the i-doc opens the potential for agency for scholars, narrators, and audiences.

References Aston, J. (2016). Interactive documentary:What does it mean and why does it matter? i-docs.org. Retrieved from http://i-docs.org/2016/03/27/interactive-documentary-what-does-it-mean-and-why-does-itmatter/ Aston, J., Gaudenzi, S., & Rose, M. (2017). Introduction. In J.Aston, S. Gaudenzi, & M. Rose (Eds.), i-Docs: The evolving practices of interactive documentary (pp. 1–8). London/New York, NY:Wallflower Press. Basten, D. (2017). Gamification. IEEE Software, 34(5), 76–81. Retrieved from https://ieeexplore-ieee-org. colorado.idm.oclc.org/document/8048643 Benjamin,W.,Arendt, H., & Zohn, H. (1969). Illuminations. New York, NY: Shocken Books. Bernard, S. (2011) Documentary storytelling: Creative nonfiction on screen. Burlington, MA: Focal Press. Cizek, K. (2017) Documentary as co-creative practice; from ‘challenge for change’ to ‘Highrise’ Kat Cizek in conversation with Mandy Rose. In J. Aston, S. Gaudenzi, & M. Rose (Eds.), i-Docs:The evolving practices of interactive documentary (pp. 38–48). London/New York, NY:Wallflower Press. Geertz, C. (1973).Thick description:Toward an interpretative theory of culture. In R. M. Emerson (Ed.), Contemporary field research:A collection of readings (pp. 37–59). Boston, MA: Little, Brown. Grele, R. (2006). Oral history as evidence. In T. L. Charlton, L. E. Myers, & R. Sharpless (Eds.), Handbook of oral history (pp. 46–69). Lanham, MD:Altamira Press. Harraway, D. (1988). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575–599. Hermer, C. (2009). Reading the mind of the ethnographic filmmaker: Mining a flawed genre for anthropological content. In M. Strong & L.Wilder (Eds.), Viewpoints:Visual anthropologists at work (pp. 121–139). Austin,TX: University of Texas Press. Hight, C. (2008). The field of digital documentary: A challenge to documentary theorists. Studies in Documentary Film, 2(8), 3–7. Hight, C. (2017) Software as co-creator in interactive documentary. In J. Aston, S. Gaudenzi, & M. Rose (Eds.), i-Docs: The evolving practices of interactive documentary (pp. 82–96). London/New York, NY: Wallflower Press. Manovich, L. (2001) The language of new media. Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Menikoff, J. (2017). Rules and regulations. Federal Register, 82(12), 7149–7274. Nash, K. (2017) I-docs and the documentary tradition: Exploring questions of citizenship. In J. Aston, S. Gaudenzi, & M. Rose (Eds.), i-Docs: The evolving practices of interactive documentary (pp. 9–25). London/ New York, NY:Wallflower Press. Portelli, A. (1998). Oral history as genre. In M. Chamberlain & P. R.Thompson (Eds.), Narrative and genre (pp. 23–45). London, UK/New York, NY: Routledge.

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Oral history, ethnography, and documentary (2018). Protection of human subjects,Title 45, Subtitle 46, Subchapter A. (July 19, 2018). Electronic code of federal regulations, (to be codified at 45 C.F.R. points A.46.102,A.46.104). Retrieved from https:// www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/retrieveECFR?gp=&SID=83cd09e1c0f5c6937cd9d7513160fc3f&pitd=20180 719&n=pt45.1.46&r=PART&ty=HTML Rabiger, M. (2009) Directing the documentary (5th ed.). Burlington, MA: Focal Press. Ryan, K. (2015). Beyond thick dialogue: Oral history and the “thickening” of multimedia storytelling. Visual Communication Quarterly, 22(April-June), 85–93.

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10 VISUAL PSYCHOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY Robert Lemelson and Annie Tucker

What makes ethnographic film impactful? What approach engages viewers, interests and excites them, encourages them to think more deeply about the potentials of ethnography? Narrating detailed material in an expository way can be instructive, depending on the topic. Presenting whole sequences of particular public cultural practices, such as rituals, religious activities, or political movements can be absorbing. Reflexively documenting the impact of the ethnographic project on the researcher can enlighten viewers regarding complex theoretical and ethical issues. Another compelling approach is to craft stories about characters one empathizes with and cares about, shaping a narrative arc that addresses their problems and conflicts and illustrates pertinent themes and issues in an emotional way. John Marshall, whose A Kalahari Family (1951– 2000) is a masterpiece of not just ethnographic film but documentary in general, once said, “If an audience member leaves the theatre and feels like they have met and understood the character, I’ve done my job” (Marshall, pers. communication). The great feature editor Walter Murch similarly stated his priorities for such groundbreaking films as The Godfather (Coppola, 1972) and Apocalypse Now (Coppola, 1979):“If you have to give up something, don’t ever give up emotion” (Jarret and Murch, 2000). These two masters, working in distinct but related filmmaking genres, suggest a central concern with emotion and character development. If these can in fact be important elements in compelling ethnographic films, then contemporary psychological anthropology, with its focus on emotion, subjectivity, and phenomenology via a person-centered approach, can provide a useful framework around which to craft visual ethnography. While this subfield is not often associated with visual methodologies, the development of a “visual psychological anthropology” has the potential to break open new vistas in ethnographic film. This approach encompasses something more reciprocal than simply bringing visuals to the field of psychological anthropology, and more specific than simply making films on topics relevant to the discipline.Visual psychological anthropology incorporates and adapts the evolving priorities, methodologies, fieldwork techniques, topics, and insights of psychological anthropology to the production of ethnographic film.Yet despite the specificity of its influences, it is an approach that can be adopted by ethnographic filmmakers whose research agendas fall outside the bounds of psychological anthropology—or even anthropology itself.

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Psychological anthropology and ethnographic film Unfortunately, given the varied domains of human experience at the intersection of the psychological and the cultural—including life course development, emotion, and sense of self, spirituality, and experiences of healing or transformation—few contemporary psychological anthropologists have made films about their subjects. The few psychological anthropologyoriented films that have been made have primarily focused on mental illness in non-Western contexts such as He is a Madman (Prince, 1963), The Spirit Possession of Alejandro Mamani (perhaps the first film to explicitly call itself “a case study in psychological anthropology” in its opening credits)(Smith and Reichline, 1974) and Latah: A Culture-Specific Elaboration of the Startle Reflex (Simons, 1983). These valuable contributions to the archive are now outdated in disciplinary approach. More recent notable productions on the topic include Speaking Tree (de Betak, 2008) and Bethel: Community and Schizophrenia in Northern Japan (Nakamura, 2007). Other than these films in transcultural psychiatry, there have been few visual ethnographies in the field. At the same time many ethnographic filmmakers, while not self-identifying as psychological anthropologists, have made films engaged with the sub-discipline’s concerns. Ethnographic film greats Robert Gardner, John Marshall, Tim Asch, and Jean Rouch began their work almost a full generation after Mead and Bateson.Their careers unfolded in parallel to the development of psychological anthropology from the 1950’s to the 1980’s, and addressed various core topics and themes of the field such as: trance, healing, and extraordinary states of consciousness; gender; racial identity; interpersonal conflict; childrearing and life course development; ritual, cosmology, and belief; and, increasingly over the course of their careers, the subjective experience of cultural practices and cultural change. Following these classics, more recent projects similarly address issues related to the concerns of psychological anthropology. For example, Celso and Cora (Kildea, 1982) intimately portrays a poor Filipino couple struggling to support themselves and their infant despite the mother’s depression. Gender identity and mourning are explored in Horses of Life and Death (Hoskins and Whitney, 1991), shot on the Eastern Indonesian island of Sumba. Friends in High Places (Merrison, 2001), about Burmese Nat Kadaw spirit mediums, addresses transgenderism, ritual life, and possession, while Benjamin and his Brother (Howes, 2002) considers the traumas of the “lost boys” of the Sudan. First Person Plural (Borshay, 2000) explores identity, family relationships, and personal suffering in international adoption. New Year Baby (Poeuv, 2008) follows a similar personal journey narrative through a “roots trip” to Cambodia to understand the effects of the Khmer Rouge genocide on the filmmaker’s family. Many other contemporary films share common thematic concerns with psychological anthropology. These are all powerful, educational, and moving films. They tangentially engage with issues and themes that psychological anthropology is uniquely situated to explore.They lack, however, explicit links to psychological anthropology theory and method.

Psychological anthropology at a crossroads: the visual revolution Despite the dearth of visual ethnography by psychological anthropologists, the field’s orientation toward internal struggles, motivations, desires, emotions, dreams, fantasy, sexuality, phenomenological and subjective individual experience can provide a vibrant guide for making films that tell absorbing and moving stories. These materials are needed more than ever with the radical changes in the widespread accessibility of moving imagery over the past half-century, escalating exponentially over the past two decades. Digitization, miniaturization, and the rise of video-enabled mobile phones, social media, streaming content, and more, has made video 107

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increasingly affordable, accessible, and easily stored.With these technological changes has come a revolution in pervasive visual documentation practices; social media platforms, primarily based on photography and video, are used daily by hundreds of millions as part of a new globalized focus on visually documenting and narrating every aspect of life. Anthropologists are grappling with the implications of these changes in habitus around visual media technology, which have lent a new urgency to some significant questions and debates in visual anthropology: how should film and video be used in anthropological research, if used at all? What counts as ethnographic film (Friedman, this book)? What are the benefits and risks in different filmmaking methodologies—be they observational, sensory, participatory, multimodal, or etc. (Collins, Durington, and Gill, 2017; Grimshaw and Ravetz, 2009; Gubrium and Harper, 2013; Ruby, 1992, 1995)? And finally, if one takes film seriously as a medium that at once conveys cultural information and acts as a discourse on culture, what strategies and techniques might best enact the ethnographic theories that filmmakers are attempting to illuminate in their work; are some more prescient to certain anthropological subfields? Most specifically to this discussion, what filmmaking approach can link psychological anthropology theory and method to the production of visual and multimodal ethnography? Filming through the lens of psychological anthropology opens up a visual and narrative approach that focuses on character development, emotional meaning, and creative representations of participants’ internal worlds. This concept and approach have been developed over the past decade plus of making ethnographic films as the documentary production company Elemental Productions.With first author Robert Lemelson as founder and director, Elemental has produced more than a dozen films in collaboration with US- and Indonesia-based scholars, cinematographers, editors, and producers. The films address issues such as trauma’s impact on life course development (Lemelson, 2009); the lived experience of mental illness and neuropsychiatric disorder (Lemelson, 2010–2011); ritual, performance, and altered states (Lemelson, 2011); grief and mourning (Lemelson, 2012a); intersectional vulnerabilities in child development (Lemelson, 2012b); gender-based violence (Lemelson, 2015); interspecies relationships (Lemelson and Young, 2018b); and a work in progress on the interpretation of and response to autism. Through the past decade we have been laying the foundation for an integrative approach of visual and psychological anthropology in ethnographic film we call “visual psychological anthropology” (Lemelson and Tucker, 2017). This orientation can productively inform every stage of visual ethnographic research from collaborative project planning, to interview strategies, to stylistic visual strategies and narrative devices, to multimodal presentations. It comprises a synergistic approach uniquely situated to investigate, portray, teach, and “translate” the core concerns of psychological anthropology. At the same time, with its focus on individual character development and the dramatic and emotional presentation of conflicts and life concerns, visual psychological anthropology encourages the integration of more mainstream cinematic techniques such as soundtracks, dramatic arcs, staged elements, and creative editing approaches. These link psychological anthropological research, visual and narrative storytelling, and content to create descriptive and affective ethnographic films.

Adapting person-centered ethnography Visual psychological anthropology is unique in ethnographic film in its utilization of “personcentered ethnography” (PCE), a core methodology of psychological anthropology developed between the 1970’s and the 1990’s by Robert Levy and Douglas Hollan (Levy, 1973; Levy and Hollan, 1998). PCE uses a set of interview techniques and strategies derived from psychoanalytic 108

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methods and principles but adapted to anthropological domains and settings. Interviews are conducted with a relatively small number of informants—typically, less than ten. Sessions of several hours are held on a weekly or monthly basis over the course of fieldwork, resulting in dozens or scores of total interview hours. The format is generally semi-structured around pre-selected domains. Often a “Checklist of Open Interview Topics” (Hollan and Wellenkamp, 1994) provides broad outlines for potential subjects such as responses to significant caretakers, puberty and adolescence, stress, illnesses and theory of illness, moral controls, nature of forbidden desires, significant relationships, dreams, interpretations of and reactions to death, sexuality, participation in specific cultural activities such as scarification or circumcision, and more. The process of interviewing is subject-guided and open-ended, with the participant encouraged to deeply explore the topics or domains under consideration that seem most salient for them. It is a classically inductive approach. Above all, PCE takes the participant’s subjective experience as its point of reference and vehicle for understanding; it asks, what is it like to be a person, with a particular history and temperament, living in a particular culture? Furthermore, PCE always strives to be “experience near:” in other words, description and analysis remain as faithful and relevant as possible to the sensations, meanings, and lived experience of the individual, rather than getting too elegant or abstract. As such, any anthropological statement needs the “supporting testimony of a tangible person or persons to whom such a statement is of real value in his system of interrelationship with other beings” (Sapir, 1958, p. 574).Theoretically, the interview material gathered gleans the internal, emotional, embodied, and idiosyncratic subjective meanings for interviewees. Analysis then contextualizes these in a particular cultural setting, while also accounting for the intersubjective aspects of the interview and research. Simultaneous to the focus on the research participant’s lived experience, PCE seeks to understand the relationship between this subjective experience and social, cultural, political, and economic contexts, including the research context (Lutz, 1988). This analytical process reflexively considers the anthropologist’s own feelings and reactions—sometimes according to psychoanalytic concepts such as defense mechanisms or transference (Gammeltoft and Segal, 2016)— an integral part of ethnographic inquiry to be accounted for in methodology and research outcomes. There are exceptional written monographs in the field using modified forms of PCE which provide a blueprint for conducting and writing psychological anthropology (such as Behar, 2003; Biehl, 2005; Crapanzano, 1980;Wikan, 1990).This blueprint can be adapted to film projects and used to inform planning and fieldwork methodology. To obtain the desired person-centered and experience near information, filmmakers can use PCE interview techniques (Hollan, 1997) with their subjects on-camera. To provide an example from a recent Elemental production, a person-centered approach was crucial to the conceptualization, trajectory, and final narrative of Bitter Honey (Lemelson, 2015). This film about three polygamous Balinese families, shot over seven years on annual summer fieldwork visits, is predominantly told from the perspective of the wives of each family. We used thematic person-centered interviewing, drawing from our understanding of the complex contours, meanings, and practices of Balinese polygamy and kinship. We addressed husbandwife intimacy, deception and control in marital relationships, notions of equity and fairness in the distribution of resources among co-wives, jealousy and its management, and other issues of central importance to the women. Here, PCE’s longitudinal approach was vital, because as relationships between the interviewers and participants deepened over time, new and even contradictory material emerged. For example, in the first year, wives in all the families were consistent in professing that their husbands were fair, peaceable, and equitable—generally, they painted 109

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a rather idyllic picture of marital bliss. In subsequent years, as the person-centered interviews lengthened and deepened and re-visited familiar topics, trust was built and the facade began to crack. In often quite emotional accounts, wives shared new material that directly contradicted the first year of interviews via unique details of their marital history and their perceptions of it. They spoke of how their husbands had been coercive, unfaithful, at times abusive or violent, and how they coped with their feelings of betrayal, disappointment, and victimization. If we had done singular interviews, or even repeat interviews that focused on didactic information or life history narratives, we would have come away with an almost entirely inaccurate understanding of what was at stake for these women in their marriages—and a very different film. By having extended, open-ended, multi-shoot, and multi-year interviews that closely followed the pressing personal concerns of each participant, we were able to build trust and allow for honest material to emerge. In addition, by sharing cuts of the film as it progressed, the participants were assured their voices were being heard and represented accurately; this was further confirmed in a series of reflexive private screenings for the wives and daughters, followed by open-ended discussions of the film and its impact on their lives.This person-centered approach, combined with classic participant observation of their daily lives, built a strong base for the difficult material of the film to be communicated.

Selecting characters One natural extension of PCE principles when planning a film project is to select a single or few “main characters.” While a psychological anthropologist often approaches fieldwork with key research questions, she must be open to the “main character’s” own perspectives on the most pressing issues in their lives and find a way to incorporate and forefront these in the ongoing research and ultimate film (Lemelson and Tucker, 2017; Tucker and Lemelson, 2017). In the example above, it was the wives themselves who supplied the emotional heart and stakes of the film, even as their accounts provided detailed cultural nuance regarding Balinese marriage and kinship. In earlier Elemental films, we often focused on a main character and their familial and social worlds, as in each film of the Afflictions series about culture and mental health (Lemelson, 2010–2011), or a singular main character, such as for Ngaben: Emotion and Restraint in a Balinese Heart, which follows one man as he navigates the multiday funerary ritual for his father and the complex emotions it evokes (Lemelson, 2012a). This most closely adheres to a PCE approach and final product. However, we have also made larger ensemble pieces. Film participants are drawn from a larger pool of interviewees, generally chosen for the interest of their retrospective and developing stories, and their “fit” for the film’s emerging thematic direction. For example, 40 Years of Silence: An Indonesian Tragedy closely follows four main characters and integrates material from family members to support their narrative trajectory.We also have included a variety of commentators—from historians (Lemelson, 2009), to anthropologists (Lemelson, 2011), to human rights lawyers (Lemelson, 2015)— to provide multiple situated perspectives on a film’s main themes.

Representing reflexivity Film can facilitate transparency regarding the research setting. While many ethnographies over the past half-century have included ethnographers’ reflexive accounts of fieldwork (e.g., Rabinow, 1977), these are still filtered through the ethnographer’s pen. While certainly never 110

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presenting the entire or objective “truth” of fieldwork, film can directly depict the anthropologist at work—speaking local languages, interacting with research collaborators and participants, “reflecting on fieldwork.” Elemental’s films have utilized multiple strategies to reflexively situate the anthropologist. The first author is heard in intermittent voiceover as well as seen throughout the earlier Afflictions series.This was partially the result of camera placement; the camera was often placed in a “two shot,” including both the interviewee and interviewer. In later films, a more documentary approach removed the interviewer from the frame. In this way the questions (and questioner) could be edited out, leaving only the participant’s response, a choice made to place more emphasis on the interviewee. Elemental has also been experimenting with more intentional reflexive approaches for a work in progress inspired by Jean Rouch’s Chronicle of a Summer (Rouch and Morin, 1961). Preproduction meetings have been filmed with an eye toward documenting the practical and ethical considerations of making visual psychological anthropology. In production, cameras have been placed in locations additional to the typical two-camera interview set-up to capture the gestalt of a particular encounter. Backward-facing cameras showed the interviewee’s social and visual context, such as family and/or friends who may not appear in the shot; side-facing cameras shot the “backstory” of the interview team; and a designated roving cameraperson captured whatever seemed interesting. This provided multiple situated and contextual perspectives, to eventually be worked into a film about the experience of participating in visual psychological anthropology. As part of this project, subjects have been interviewed about their understanding of the film they had participated in, and their relationships with the anthropologist and crew, by other local team members.The research and film crew were also individually interviewed about the filmmaking process.

Focus on emotion The person-centered approach of visual psychological anthropology sees emotional meaning as crucial to character and narrative development, just as important as the explication of cultural material. This means fore-fronting emotion in ethnographic inquiry and representation, moving past interpretivist approaches, and deconstructing the idea of “objectivity” in the field or onscreen. Similar to the new forms of ethnographic writing that emerged in the 1980’s and 1990’s in response to the call for a more affective anthropology that applied stylistic conventions of fiction, memoir, and even poetry (e.g., Clifford and Marcus, 1986) to more powerfully—and accurately (Damasio, 2010) convey the experience of research participants and invite the emotional engagement of readers, so too does visual psychological anthropology call for a more “forceful” (Rosaldo, 1989) ethnographic film. There are established film techniques for conveying and evoking emotion, from shot composition to a narrative structure that addresses conflict and resolution in character development, to the use of an evocative soundtrack—all post-production techniques that documentary filmmakers still use (Ingmire, 2017) but many ethnographic filmmakers have abandoned them, despite their shared heritage (Ruby, 2000). From the standpoint of psychological anthropology, using these techniques is crucially important in understanding the stakes, dilemmas, and contexts of people’s lives. Due to cultural norms and personal styles of emotional expression, filmmakers may need to intentionally render emotion more cross-culturally legible. In our case, Indonesian norms of social etiquette de-emphasize or avoid the expression of “negative” emotions (Geertz, 1966; Wikan, 1990)—which of course does not mean that these are not deeply felt nor that there 111

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isn’t a need to express them. In conducting filmed interviews, we may occasionally go against these norms, pressing subjects to discuss matters that in typical conversation would be politely avoided; and we may need to significantly edit down the awkward and uncomfortable hesitations that arise in these discussions to quicken the pace of disclosure and create a sense of emotional immediacy (Lemelson and Tucker, 2015). While the use of soundtrack in ethnographic film has been contested (Heider, 1974; Grimshaw and Ravetz, 2009), music also has great potential to express some of the more ephemeral aspects of emotional experience.We have worked with music editors and composers to develop unique scores and soundtracks for each film that reflect internal emotional states, interpersonal dynamics, and narrative arcs.We have integrated Indonesian instrumentation, tonal and scalar progressions, and melodic themes to create soundtracks that are meaningful and emotionally resonant for both Indonesian and Western audiences. For example, for 40 Years of Silence we recorded the song “Genjer-Genjer” in several styles, with different instrumentation, rhythms, and pacing to reflect and support the themes and mood of different scenes in the film. “Genjer-Genjer” is a Javanese folk song first played at rallies for the Indonesian Communist Party and then incorporated into propaganda films made by Suharto’s New Order Regime to demonize the Party, which had been wiped out in the mass killings of 1965 and 1966. By using this most potent song, with its polyvalent meanings and history, to illustrate aspects of the personal experience of the characters, we explicitly linked their suffering to the larger themes in this bloody and tragic history.The deep resonance and meaning of this song have been evidenced at screenings of the film in Indonesia for survivors of the mass killings and imprisonments, where audience members first gasp in surprise, and perhaps fear, when they hear the melody, and then often cry as the song continues to play. In crafting a soundtrack, it is important to remember that cultural genres and conventions will influence viewers’ interpretations, and emotionally resonant music will be different, in this case, in the United States and Indonesia. A balance must be struck between local music, which can culturally situate and inform the viewer, and more familiar-sounding music that will be able to communicate the intended meaning to, again in this case, a Western or American audience through familiar tonalities and melodic structures. Ultimately, visual psychological anthropology includes sound and music in its meaning-making toolkit and filmmakers should consider a sound concept or style for each film.

Using stylistic variations to represent unique subjectivities Each film strives to represent characters’ unique subjectivities with visual and narrative strategies that mirror and evoke their lived experience. Various techniques, including naturalistic shoots, sit-down interviews, and “set” shots can be used to capture embodied experience as well as emergent life events. In naturalistic shots, of course, the subject is documented going about their daily activities; this footage can be representative of aspects of life known to be important from interviews (certain aspects of daily routine, or key relationships, for example) or exploratory, with an eye toward emergent events. Establishing shots and B-roll would also fall under this category of naturalistic shots. Interviews of course are to a greater or lesser extent staged. In traditional ethnographic film, a strict distinction was made between naturalistic and “set” shots, with the latter being seen as more artificial. Early anthropologists, such as Malinowski and Evans-Pritchard, emphasized the “normal and spontaneous” nature of their visual documentation and hence the “disciplinary truth” of their images (Banks and Ruby, 2011). Other early anthropologists were sure to note whether an image was captured during the natural unfolding of events, posed, or recorded in atypical circumstances, for technical or other reasons (Edwards, 2001). 112

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But “set” or “staged” shots—especially when they are determined in relation to interview material or in collaboration with the characters—can reveal the emotional or poetic truth of a character’s situation and concretize internal worlds of dreams, fantasies, and memories while upholding ethnographic veracity (Lemelson and Tucker, 2017; Lemelson and Young, 2018a). Such shots can also depict events that have not been or cannot be filmed. Visual psychological anthropologists should feel free to incorporate creative multimodal strategies such as animation, re-enactment, and a degree of staged as opposed to naturally occurring material (Lemelson and Tucker, 2017), all of which can serve the double duty of providing ethnographic information or texture while depicting subjective experience. The possibilities for this kind of visual representation is limited only by the filmmaker’s imagination and should be tailored to each character’s story and experience. Some examples of set footage we have used in the Afflictions series (Lemelson, 2010–2011) range from simple shots to more complex sequences. In The Bird Dancer, we wanted to depict the main character’s painful sense of isolation from her family and community due to her illness, despite being surrounded by the lush aesthetic production and dense interconnections of Balinese community and culture.To do so we asked her to stand on a busy market street, looking forlornly toward the camera as waves of traffic passed by her. In Ritual Burdens, we used natural imagery and sound to depict the content and quality of the main character’s sensations and fixations, which also rendered the Balinese pastoral landscape. In Kites and Monsters, we asked the main character to draw pictures; this allowed for the depiction of the esoteric mythological creatures that captured his imagination while acting as an embodied metaphor for child development. In Shadows and Illuminations, we shot reflections of Balinese masks of demonic spirits rippling in the water to render the spirits the main character was seeing while evoking the mysterious elements of his experience that seemed to elude his full understanding. Extended shot sequences we have used include re-enactments of significant recounted but unrecorded episodes, always cued to look different from directly observed footage by techniques such as soft focus, slow-motion, colored filters, or lighting effects. We have also recreated the substance of a character’s symbolic and transformational dream for Family Victim, where a chrysalis turns into a butterfly; and in Memory of My Face created original animations that depicted the globalized content of the main character’s manic delusions in the style of Indonesian shadow puppetry to underscore the multiple influences on his subjective experience of mental illness.

Conclusion Visual psychological anthropology, while in its infancy, has great potential for supporting the development of innovative, impactful, and emotionally resonant films that can involve audiences in more embodied engagements with anthropological scholarship. Its philosophy and orientation can be applied to numerous topics and, as these later projects illustrate, its method is adaptable; while recommending certain strategies in the field, particularly longitudinal personcentered ethnography that focuses on emotion and individual character development, visual psychological anthropology can be applied to and combined with a range of styles in shooting and accommodate a variety of creative visions. No matter what, this approach toward ethnography offers its practitioners the ability to spark strong emotions in viewers—be they poignant empathy, anger at injustice, or awe over new and startling ways to see the world—that motivate them to want to learn more, and more deeply.With the incorporation of this approach, the next decade holds great promise for more holistic, powerful, and resonant ethnographic film. 113

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References Banks, M., & Ruby, J. (Eds). (2011). Made to be seen: Perspectives on the history of visual anthropology. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Behar, R. (2003). Translated woman: Crossing the border with Esperanza’s story. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Biehl, J. G. (2005). Vita: Life in a zone of social abandonment. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Borshay, D. (Director). (2000). First person plural [Motion picture]. 60 min.Arlington,VA: POV/PBS. Clifford, J., & Marcus, G. E. (1986). Writing culture: The poetics and politics of ethnography. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Collins, S. J., Durington, M., & Gill, H. (2017). Multimodality:An invitation. American Anthropologist, 119(1), 142–153. Coppola, F. F. (Director). (1972). The godfather [Motion picture]. 175 min. United States: Paramount Pictures. Coppola, F. F. (Director). (1979). Apocalypse now [Motion picture]. 2 hr 33 min. United States: Zoetrope Studios. Crapanzano,V. (1980). Tuhami: Portrait of a Moroccan. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Damasio,A. R. (2010). Self comes to mind: Constructing the conscious brain. New York, NY: Pantheon Books. de Betak, N. (Director). (2008). Speaking tree [Ethnographic film]. 62 min. Watertown, MA: Documentary Educational Resources. Retrieved from http://www.der.org/films/speaking-tree.html Edwards, E. (2001). Raw histories: Photographs, anthropology and museums. Oxford, England: Berg. Gammeltoft, T. M, & Segal, L. B. (2016). Anthropology and psychoanalysis: Explorations at the edges of culture and consciousness. Ethos, 44(4), 399–410. Geertz, C. (1966). Religion as a cultural system. In M. Banton (Ed.), Anthropological approaches to the study of religion (pp. 1–46). London:Tavistock. Grimshaw, A., & Ravetz, A. (2009). Rethinking observational cinema. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 15(3), 538–556. Gubrium,A., & Harper, K. (2013). Participatory visual and digital methods.Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. Heider, K. (Director). (1974). Dani houses [Ethnographic film]. 35 min. Watertown, MA: Documentary Educational Resources. Retrieved from http://www.der.org/films/karl-heider-dani-films.html Hollan, D., & Wellenkamp, J. C. (1994). Contentment and suffering: Culture and experience in Toraja. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Hollan, D. (1997).The relevance of person-centered ethnography to cross-cultural psychiatry. Transcultural Psychiatry, 34(2), 219–243. Hoskins, J., & Whitney, L. (Directors). (1991). Horses of life and death [Ethnographic film]. 28 min. Los Angeles, CA: Center for Visual Anthropology. Retrieved from http://www.der.org/films/horses-oflife-and-death.html Howes, A. (Director). (2002). Benjamin and his brother [Ethnographic film]. 87 min. Watertown, MA: Documentary Educational Resources. Retrieved from http://www.der.org/films/benjamin-and-hisbrother.html Ingmire, G. (2017, August 6). Re: Do we even need to define ethnographic film? [Blog comment]. Retreived from https://savageminds.org/2017/07/20/do-we-even-need-to-define-ethnographicfilm/#comment-840268 Jarret, M., & Murch, W. (2000). Sound doctrine: An interview with Walter Murch. Film Quarterly, 53(3), 2–11. Kildea, G. (Director). (1982). Celso and cora [Motion picture]. 109 min. Mitchell, Australia: Ronin Films. Retrieved from https://www.roninfilms.com.au/feature/538/celso-cora-manila-story.html Lemelson, R. (Director). (2009). 40 years of silence: An Indonesian tragedy [Motion picture]. 86 min. Watertown, MA: Documentary Educational Resources. Lemelson, R. (Director). (2010–2011). Afflictions series: Culture and mental illness in Indonesia [Ethnographic film series]. 182 min.Watertown, MA: Documentary Educational Resources. Lemelson, R. (Director). (2011). Jathilan [Ethnographic film]. 27 min. Watertown, MA: Documentary Educational Resources. Lemelson, R. (Director). (2012a). Ngaben [Ethnographic film]. 16 min. Watertown, MA: Documentary Educational Resources. Lemelson, R. (Director). (2012b). Standing on the edge of a thorn [Ethnographic film] 33 min. Watertown, MA: Documentary Educational Resources. Lemelson, R. (Director). (2015). Bitter honey [Motion picture]. 81 min. Watertown, MA: Documentary Educational Resources.

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Visual psychological anthropology Lemelson, R., & Tucker,A. (2015). Steps towards integrating psychological and visual anthropology: Issues raised in the production of the Afflictions film series. Ethos, 43(1), 6–39. Lemelson, R., & Tucker,A. (2017). Afflictions: Steps towards a visual psychological anthropology. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Lemelson, R., & Young, B. (Directors). (2018a). Tajen: Interactive [interactive web documentary]. Retrieved from www.tajeninteractive.com Lemelson, R., & Young, B. (2018b).The Balinese cockfight reimagined: Tajen: Interactive and the prospects for a multimodal anthropology. American Anthropologist, 120(4), 831–843. Levy, R. I. (1973). Tahitians: Mind and experience in the Society Islands. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Levy, R. I., & Hollan, D. (1998). Person-centered interviewing and observation. In H. R. Bernard (Ed.), Handbook of methods in cultural anthropology (pp. 333–364). Lanham, MD:Alta Mira Press. Lutz, C. (1988). Unnatural emotions: Everyday sentiments on a Micronesian atoll and their challenge to Western theory. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Marshall, J. (Director). (1951–2001). A Kalahari family [Ethnographic film]. 360 min. Watertown, MA: Documentary Educational Resources. Merrison, L. (Director). (2001). Friends in high places [Ethnographic film]. 88 min. Watertown, MA: Documentary Educational Resources. Retrieved from https://store.der.org/friends-in-high-placesp832.aspx Nakamura, K. (Director) (2007). Bethel: Community and schizophrenia in northern Japan [Ethnographic film]. 40 min. New Haven, CT: Manic Films.. Poeuv, S. (Director). (2008). New year baby [Motion picture]. 80 min. San Francisco, CA: ITVS. Prince, R. H. (Director). (1963). Were Ni: He is a madman [Ethnographic film]. 27 min. London, UK: Royal Anthropological Institute,. Rabinow, P. (1977). Reflections on fieldwork in Morocco. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. Rosaldo, R. (1989). Culture and truth:The remaking of social analysis (pp. 1–21). Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Rouch, J., & Morin, E. (Directors). (1961). Chronique d’ete [Chronicle of a Summer] [Motion picture]. 85 min. Neuilly sur Seine, France:Argo Films. Ruby, J. (1992). Speaking for, speaking about, speaking alongside—An anthropological and documentary dilemma. Visual Anthropology Review, 7(2), 50–67. Ruby, J. (1995). The moral burden of authorship in ethnographic film. Visual Anthropology Review, 11(2), 77–82. Ruby, J. (2000). Picturing culture: Explorations of film and anthropology. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Sapir, E. (1958). Culture, language and personality: Selected essays. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Simons, R. C. (1983). Latah: A culture-specific elaboration of the startle reflex [Ethnographic film]. 38 min. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Audiovisual Center. Smith, H., & Reichline, N. (Directors). (1974). The spirit possession of Alejandro Mamani [Ethnographic film]. 22 min. Boston, MA: Documentary Educational Resources. Tucker, A., & Lemelson, R. (2017). Filming The Bird Dancer:Visual psychological anthropology and the lived experience of disability. In C. Brylla & H. Hughes (Eds.), Documentary and disability (pp. 27–42). Hampshire, UK/New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Wikan, U. (1990). Managing turbulent hearts:A Balinese formula for living. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Zemp, H. (Director). (2001–2002). Masters of the balafon series [Ethnographic film]. 221 min. Watertown, MA: Documentary Educational Resources. Retrieved from http://www.der.org/films/masters-of-thebalafon.html

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11 VIDEO DIARIES Charlotte Bates

I first encountered the video diary at a workshop in 2006.That day, Jennifer Patashnick gave a presentation on Video Intervention/Prevention Assessment (VIA): a project based at the Center on Media and Child Health, Children’s Hospital Boston. The VIA project was unique. It gave video cameras to young people with chronic medical conditions and asked them to share the stories of their lives in the form of video diaries. Each VIA participant was loaned a lightweight handheld video camcorder and asked to “teach your doctor about your life and your condition.” The atmosphere in the small, dark seminar room was palpable. Both raw and moving, the video footage demanded to be witnessed but was uncomfortable to watch. Some in the audience averted their eyes as drops of bright red blood fell from a young man’s mouth and pooled into the palm of his hand, which he held out to the camera. 25-year-old Jay had cystic fibrosis, and bloody coughing episodes like this one were part of his daily life. His testimony remained with me long after his video diary had ended. The VIA project began in 1994 and has been used to explore the experiences of young people living with asthma, obesity, sickle-cell disease, cystic fibrosis, HIV, and spina bifida. Around the same time,Valerie Walkerdine, Helen Lucey and June Melody were working on Project 4:21: a longitudinal study of 30 working-class and middle-class British girls focused on how social class informs life trajectories.When the girls were 16 or 21 years old they were invited to make their own video diaries about their “transition to womanhood.” Channel 4 became involved in the study, and ten three-minute extracts from the diaries were broadcast on prime-time television in a series called Girls, Girls, Girls.The series was part of a move from factual filmmaking to a focus on the personal, marking the popularity of video diaries, reality TV, and the confessional culture of the 1990’s. More recently, researchers have begun to experiment with video diaries as a way of sharing many different stories, across health, identity, sports, higher education, and tourism. From aging and self-representation (Threadgold, 2000), to primary school learning dispositions (Noyes, 2004), identity and sexuality (Holliday, 2004), identity and physical impairment (Gibson, 2005), higher education (Cashmore et al., 2010), being an immigrant (Brown et al., 2010), childhood and death (Buchwald et al., 2012), family Christmases (Muir and Mason, 2012), sports (Cherrington and Watson, 2010; Darko and Mackintosh, 2016; Jones et al., 2014), tourism and home (Pocock and McIntosh, 2013), breastfeeding (Taylor, 2015), sport and disability (Apelmo, 2017), transgender transitioning (Klein et al., 2018), and even Antarctic explorations (Nash and 116

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Moore, 2018), the sheer variety of topics that video diaries have been used to investigate illustrates the possibilities that they have opened up. Inspired by the VIA project, I began my own PhD fieldwork, working with people who have long-term conditions, talking with them about their everyday lives and illness experiences and asking them to make their own video diaries (Bates, 2019). I hoped that these video diaries would become a version of what Les Back (2007) describes as sociological listening, a way to “record ‘life passed in living’ and to listen to complex experiences with humility and ethical care.”This chapter draws on experiences from my own fieldwork to illuminate the practical and methodological issues that working with video diaries entails. The chapter also highlights some of the lessons that can be drawn from the burgeoning literature on video diaries. It begins by discussing the practicalities of giving people video cameras to film their own lives. I touch on each stage of making a video diary, from choosing a video camera, to writing instructions, and working with an ethical sensibility.To end the chapter, I outline ways of analyzing, editing, and writing video.

Video cameras Filmmaking used to be something that cost a fortune and required technical as well as artistic skill. Today, thanks to modern technology, anybody can do it. Kodak’s Super 8 movie format created a mini-boom in home movies in the 1970’s, and since then cameras have become smaller and more affordable as they have transitioned from bulky VHS camcorders, MiniDV cameras, and DVDRAM camcorders, to compact video cameras that record high-definition digital video onto memory cards. Beyond this, smartphones now have the capacity to record video at the touch of a finger. When I began my fieldwork, video cameras were already available to the mass market. I chose two video cameras for the project, a Sony HDR-SR10E and a Sony HDR-TG7VE, which I bought for the study with funding from the University of London Central Research Fund. Both video cameras were capable of recording high quality footage to memory cards, and were small and easy to use.The HDR-SR10E is a typical handycam, while the HDR-TG7VE is an ultra-compact vertical camcorder, which I hoped would be easier for participants to use while performing other activities as it is smaller and lighter to hold. One problem, that I had not anticipated, was that it was difficult to rest the HDR-TG7VE on a surface or put it down and continue recording, making hands-free filming impossible. I also bought a lightweight tripod, which one of the participants who had difficulty moving around with the camera in hand chose to use. However, I avoided external microphones or lights as I wanted to keep the kit as simple as possible.These video cameras came with technical, aesthetic, and practical possibilities and limitations, all of which shaped the footage that was made for the study.They were small enough to be comfortable within the home as well as being unobtrusive in more public spaces, and they looked good. As Stewart Muir notes,“The camcorder’s appearance may seem a trivial matter, but it can influence participant interest and enthusiasm” (2008, p. 4). The quality of the footage was also good enough to show to a wider audience, something that I set out with the intention of doing. Handycams are the obvious choice for a video diary project. As Anita Biressi and Heather Nunn write: “The technical characteristics of the camcorder—its lightweight transportability, synchronised sound, easy editing facilities and relative cheapness—help produce a format that emphasises the intimate, spontaneous, exposing and endearing amateur or superficially guileless moment” (2005, p. 72). But different types of cameras offer other possibilities. In his study of children’s learning dispositions, Andrew Noyes set up a Big Brother “diary room” in a school classroom using a large VHS camera.As he writes,“When I first developed the diary technique I decided against digital video recording and opted for the bigger camera to add realism to the diary room” (2004, p. 205). In Barbara Gibson’s study, participants had significantly limited 117

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mobility, used wheelchairs, and relied on physical and mechanical assistance for most activities of daily living.To create their video diaries, participants were given a small hands-free “bullet” camera that was mounted on a baseball cap and connected to a standard digital video camera placed in a bag and hung from the wheelchair (2005, p. 35). More recently, Meredith Nash and Robyn Moore (2018) asked participants to create video diaries on their own cameras (of any type), making the most out of the technology we now have at our disposal. Participants in their study used a range of devices to record video diaries, from mobile phones to basic point-andshoot cameras to high-quality digital single-lens reflex (SLR) cameras. Whatever device you choose, it is important to think through its possibilities and limitations.

Instructions Asking someone to use a video camera also necessitates thinking about training and instructions. Each time I handed over a camera I demonstrated its basic operating features.While the rawness of the footage is a quality of video diaries, basic technical training can maximize video quality. Similarly, young people taking part in VIA projects are trained in the basic fundamentals of operating consumer camcorders using “indirect teaching” methods: The goal is to help them develop competence in the technical aspects of shooting video (aiming the camcorders at their chosen subject, loading tapes, changing batteries) without teaching visual style or composition, video-making techniques, or otherwise influencing the way that participants perceive and portray their experience. (Rich, 2004, p. 168) Trained only in the fundamentals of making the camera work, the resulting footage is often amateur in quality, but contains raw documentation of their illness experiences. Beyond making the camera work, the fundamentals of lighting and framing are also important to discuss. Poorly lit footage is a common pitfall and can make it difficult to see the image.This can easily be avoided, as Alison Taylor notes, I did not want to ask mothers to add extra lighting for my viewing purpose alone. Indeed the ambience of a dimly lit room provided the authenticity that I was hoping to capture. However, a simple statement on the guidance sheet was added to encourage mothers to consider where to position the camcorder in relation to natural lighting. (2015, p. 73) Some video cameras also have functions that can be useful in specific situations. The “night vision” setting on my video cameras proved unexpectedly useful, and several video diary entries were recorded at night using this feature, adding a 24/7 dimension to the project (see Figure 11.1). In addition to basic training, I provided some simple written instructions. I simply asked the participants to use the video camera to show and tell about their body and their condition over the course of one week. In the event, most of the participants recorded their video diaries over longer periods of time than a week, although in many instances filming only took place on a few days.While my instructions were informal, my participants had already been interviewed for the study and had a good idea of what I was interested in, as well as what they wanted to show and tell me about through the video camera.As Barbara Gibson (2005) notes, participants’ understanding of the project and their previous interactions with the researcher will influence what they film, and even the most basic and informal instructions establish the parameters 118

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Figure 11.1

Night shot. My eye. Upside down like my thoughts. I’m trying to get to sleep but can’t because my thoughts are spinning round. (Anna: video diary.)

within which participants tell their stories. As Maria Pini and Valerie Walkerdine write,“This is not about something produced away from the research ‘gaze’.What is produced is always done so in response to the perceived focus of the project” (2011, p. 144). Without a clear sense of how to begin a video diary project can easily fail to materialize, and a list of “hooks” or activities can be useful as a way of reducing procrastination without constraining the imagination.These might include “personal monologues” in which the participant speaks directly to the camera on a daily basis, a “video tour” of their homes and neighborhoods, or interviews with family and friends. Despite the current popularity of video, the participants in my study were often initially uncomfortable with the idea of filming in public places, being in front of the video camera, and recording their own voices.To make recording a video diary less daunting they were encouraged to film short clips of their daily lives. This format meant that long monologues did not dominate the frame, and it allowed everyday sights and sounds to come into focus.The hints and traces of bodies shown in different acts and contexts—at work and at home, exercising, gardening, eating, and sleeping—provided glimpses into the participants’ lives that would have been hard to access with other methods. In other studies, researchers have provided more detailed instructions or maintained contact with participants during the filming process, which can last from weeks to months.As Michael Rich notes, some participants “needed to be assured that their everyday lives, which often seemed boring to them, were interesting to the researchers and worthy of recording” (2004, p. 170). Once rolling, video diary studies have the potential to generate hundreds of hours of footage (Project 4:21 participants produced 175 hours of diary material and the VIA-Asthma study participants produced nearly 500 hours of video), so it is important to think about how much footage you might want in advance, as well as how the footage is going to be stored and collected. It is unlikely that the amount of footage each participant will create will be consistent. Some participants will struggle to record anything and others will record for hours. Before the footage is collected, it is important that participants are given the opportunity to edit their diary to ensure that only video footage they are comfortable with sharing is used.

Ethics and representation The visible and audible presence of participants on screen strongly conflicts with the presumption that good ethical practice requires automatic anonymity for participants (for example, see 119

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the British Sociological Association’s Statement of Ethical Practice). But as Shamser Sinha and Les Back argue, this default position “is an anxious symptom of ethical hypochondria, which limits the opportunities to rethink authorship and innovate new formats for research” (2014, p. 484). Implicit in the instruction sheet that I used for my study was an awareness of the potential for participants to reveal or conceal themselves through the video camera, something that we carefully discussed both before filming and after. Instead of automatically ensuring anonymity and concealing all data that might have revealed the participants’ identities, from on camera shots to voice recordings and filming locations, I decided to work with an ethics of recognition. This meant that I was able to adapt the video diary method as I worked with each participant, so that they controlled the degree to which they revealed their bodies and identities to the video camera. Some participants were comfortable on camera, others preferred not to film themselves directly, and one participant chose to film in silence. In order to maintain her anonymity Anna (a pseudonym) wrote notes to the video camera, which were then placed as subtitles on the screen. This allowed her to make a video diary without revealing her identity through the recognizable sound of her voice, and ensured her privacy without restricting her participation. Stewart Muir and Jennifer Mason’s Christmas videos show participants’ faces, bodies, and homes.As they write, In some ways, in our digital age, where ‘reality TV’ and self publicity through social networking is commonplace, we think it may sometimes be surprisingly easy for researchers to seek and gain 360 degree entry into certain aspects of people’s lives, in full colour vision and sound. (2012, 4.17) Video diaries give us access to places, interactions, and occasions that we cannot otherwise or easily join in, from family gatherings (Muir and Mason, 2012) to remote locations (Nash and Moore, 2018). The surprising ease of 360-degree entry as well as 24/7 recording means that while video diaries may seem less intrusive than traditional ethnographic observation, they are always in danger of creating footage that is nonetheless too personally intrusive.Working with video diaries necessitates rethinking established ethical boundaries, but it remains important to maintain an ethical responsibility and, as Stewart Muir and Jennifer Mason note,“it is vital that clips are chosen with great care” (2012, 4.12).There is a strong moral imperative to think carefully about what we do with video footage, as well as how we communicate our work, and in my own work I have been cautious not to make any of the video diaries public in their entirety, instead selecting only clips that do not reveal faces to show to a wider audience or make into printed video stills.

Redesigning observation While photography and film have traditionally been used as tools for ethnographic study by an outside observer, in asking the participants to make a video diary I invited them to take an ethnographic position and become observers of their own lives. As Michael Rich and Jennifer Patashnick write, “Video-based research has worked by observing ‘from the outside in.’ VIA examines the illness experience ‘from the inside out’” (2002, p. 249). This inside out perspective, in which participants take up “a dual position of both observer and observed” (Pini and Walkerdine, 2011, p. 147), redesigns observation and the ethnographic gaze. As Maria Pini and Valerie Walkerdine write, “Despite the fact that these diarists are not intentionally or formally 120

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setting out to conduct ‘visual ethnography’, they are nevertheless on an ethnographic journey” (2011, p. 146). Instead of removing the observer from the picture or providing a one-way lens, the video camera offers a set of eyes and ears for the participant to speak to, and as a physical object it leads the participant-observers on a tour of their own lives. Camera relationships are remarkable. Andrew Noyes describes the video camera in his diary room as “audience, confidant, counsellor, friend, researcher” (2004, p. 202), noting that these relationships shift, not only from entry to entry but within single sessions. The children in his study positioned themselves differently in relation to the “stranger-camera” (Noyes, 2004, p. 2000). Stacey, for example, used the camera as her confidant but was also acutely aware of her audience. She commented,“When I look at the camera it’s like someone’s looking at me” (Noyes, 2004, p. 201). In Gerry Bloustein’s study, one girl, Diane, said that the camera “became like my best friend” (1998, p. 122), and in Valerie Walkerdine’s Project 4:21 the camera was described as a trusted confidante, a good friend who listens but does not pass judgment. As Maria Pini and Valerie Walkerdine write, “the camera became for many of these young women a ‘friend’ who accompanies them on their various outings; who sits listening to them late at night and who shares secrets” (2011, p. 142). The camera is not only a friend, but also—as Stacey points out—an audience. In many of the VIA video diaries, and in my own work, participants express an urgent need to show and tell, even in the middle of the night. Comments like “I thought I should show you this” and “I need to tell you this” reaffirm the research agenda and establish the presence of a researcher/audience outside the frame.They show that video diaries are produced for an imagined “other” (Holliday, 2000), but also that video cameras are not simply less invasive than a researcher—they too take on the position of a surveillant outsider. By taking on the role of a trusted confidante or friend, the video camera can enable and may even encourage participants to offload their thoughts, feelings, and experiences,“revealing an emotional rollercoaster” (Taylor, 2015). Sometimes participants discuss issues they have kept silent for years (Brown et al., 2010). The video camera can draw attention to issues, providing a platform for “working it out” by discussing, reflecting, and sharing thoughts (Taylor, 2015). In their study, Meredith Nash and Robyn Moore note that “confessional” videos “were used specifically for intimate emotional processing and reflection” (2018, p. 8). Typically, these camera relationships build over time. But not all participants will develop such intimate camera relationships.As Jim Cherrington and Beccy Watson note, some of the participants appeared to be talking through the camera as if it were a friend/known source of social interaction, whilst some seemed to treat it as a technological piece of machinery and were visibly less comfortable about talking to ‘it.’ (2010, p. 277) And in Meredith Nash and Robyn Moore’s Antarctic study, “women worked the boundaries of intimacy and distance in their video entries depending on their levels of comfort with the process from day to day” (2018, p. 8).

Filming styles Video diaries are characterized by their raw, untrained, personal perspective, but they can draw on and are influenced by many different film styles.The participants in my work brought their own visual skills to the task of making a video diary, and found their own ways of working with the video camera and their own filmic language.They made different choices about what and how to film, and controlled the degree to which they revealed their bodies and identities to 121

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the video camera. The video diaries ranged from reality television to intimate personal diary, and from action shots to quiet reflections. While cultural references helped the participants to style their video diaries, their media literacy (Rich, 2004) did not lead to rehearsed or polished performances (although this is not always the case, for example sometimes participants confess to rehearsing their “productions” (Jones et al., 2014, p. 400). Instead, filming styles can be understood as playful engagements with the video diary method. For example, conducting a “Spendaholics” or “You Are What You Eat” reality television show shock tactic for herself,Alice decided to record a tidy up of her bedroom on video. She found 22 empty Lucozade bottles in her room and lined them up along the foot of her bed.The display quantified the presence of Lucozade in Alice’s body and her life and highlighted the significance of this seemingly ordinary drink (see Figure 11.2). Amara used her video diary to discuss her fears in an intimate conversation with her boyfriend. Hidden behind a book,Amara’s boyfriend used a camera phone to look back at the video camera while she asked him a series of uncompromisingly honest questions:“What do you think about my body? Do you think it is unusual? Do you think it is different? How do you feel about the fact that I’m barren?”. Other researchers have also observed a range of filming styles in their video diaries. In Alison Taylor’s study, the range of styles of mothers’“performances” in front of the camera was varied, “with chatty informal dialogue and occasional demonstrations, short planned ‘reports’, long reflective discourses, ranting shouts for help and tearful bouts of emotion” (2015, p. 271). Stewart Muir and Jennifer Mason’s (2012) “Christmas videos” were made up of a mixture of narration, explanation to the camera, fly on the wall documentary and home-movie, while the video diaries made by teenage girls in Gerry Bloustein’s (2003) study contained aspects of music video, parodies of David Attenborough-style documentaries, and mock current affairs formats. It can be useful to categorize video diaries by their filming styles. Ruth Holliday (2004) discusses two fundamentally different styles of diary: “entertaining” videos made with partners

Figure 11.2 I’m doing a tidy up, so if you see the mess in my room ignore that, but I’ve just counted the amount of Lucozade that I’ve found in my bin, probably, if I’m quite honest, 3 months, so January through to March, that’s probably not all of it really. So that’s 6 weeks’ worth, its 22 bottles, that doesn’t include the glucose tablets I have, or the bottles that I’ve left at my boyfriend’s place or taken in the street. Quite an array, as you can see. Charlotte Bates. (Alice: video diary.)

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and friends, and “confessional” videos made alone. Similarly, Meredith Nash and Robyn Moore (2018) categorized their video diaries as “the confessional” or “the tourist log.”The closeness of participant’s faces to the camera, the direct address, the tight framing, and amateur style of production made “the confessional” videos feel like a two-person conversation, while “the tourist log” featured sights and sounds from the environment, from ice cracking to seals roaring, and captured the multisensory experience of the Antarctic landscape. As these “tourist log” or “nature documentary” videos show, video diaries and filming styles are also influenced by location. Most diaries tend to be filmed at home; as Ruth Holliday notes, other environments can be more challenging (2004, p. 1615). Meredith Nash and Robyn Moore’s participants struggled to film their “confessional” video diaries in private while on-board the ship, seeking refuge in their cabins and bathrooms. Most of the filming in my own study took place in the comfort and safety of the participants’ homes, but the participants did also venture out with the cameras for walks, to parks, to work, to hospital, on public transport, and to the gym. Sometimes, the video camera is handed over to another person and this, too, can influence the filming style. For example, the researcher might be enlisted to do some of the filming (Bloustein, 1998; Gibson, 2005), or a parent or partner might be given control of the camera.Whoever is filming, handheld camera techniques, where the camera is in the middle of the activity, will create different footage to a video camera set up on a tripod to record events or a monologue from a distance.

Analyzing, editing, and writing video Video diaries can produce an abundant amount of ethnographic information, and going about analyzing, editing, and writing video footage can seem like an immense task. The richness of the data, multiplied by tens or even hundreds of hours of footage, means that the challenge of analysis is magnified. Each VIA project involves a detailed process of observation, coding, interpretation, evaluation, and critical assessment of visual data, in which verbal, nonverbal, visual, and audio data are logged and analyzed by a multidisciplinary team (Rich and Chalfen, 1999, p. 68). Projects on this scale can be aided by qualitative analysis software.The VIA team use NVivo for data management, structuring, and analysis (Rich and Patashnick, 2002), but this does not replace the many hours spent watching and coding, and re-watching and recoding, footage. Other researchers have chosen to explore video diaries through follow-up interviews or viewings with the participants (Gibson, 2005; Noyes, 2004), adding another layer of data and allowing questions to be asked and explanations given. In my own work, I approached analysis by watching the video footage back, logging specific activities and moments, and transcribing the aural monologues and conversations.Transcription of video is complex. Some researchers choose to transcribe critical moments, others write video logs that are part descriptive and part verbatim. Another option is to write free-flowing notes made during repeated viewings. All these methods can help to hold onto the richness of the data, but also carry the risk of data loss. While my transcription focused on the voices within the video diaries, the process of editing, cutting, and re-framing footage helped me to become fully immersed in the video data and develop a heightened attention to both the audio and the visual components of the video diaries. As I manipulated the video, I drew attention to particular moments, zooming in on some elements, cutting others out, and laying sound down over footage in different places.The work of editing and sequencing video footage can be seen as paralleling the more standard academic task of selecting and framing quotes from discursive sources when writing up research. It is also a mode of analysis in itself, a process of “sifting, sorting and composing” that highlights the intimacy we build with the material we are working with (Garrett and Hawkins, 2015, p. 156). 123

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As audiovisual data, video diaries contain audible and visible dimensions beyond participants’ verbal accounts, and it is important that these do not fall out of the analysis, and that we do not fall back on an over-reliance on voice.Video allows for an appreciation of body language and facial expressions. As Elizabet Apelmo writes, “Gazes, a forehead with a frown, a gesticulating hand or a changed distance to the camera can convey a changed emotional state and strengthen or contradict an interpretation” (2017, p. 39). Similarly, Robyn Jones writes, “through the (embodied) smiles, frowns and expression of mood, we certainly found clues about thoughts and feelings which could not have been clearly and so completely articulated by words” (Jones et al., 2014, p. 406), and Dorte Buchwald notes that the opportunity to examine both verbal and nonverbal expressions among children revealed “testimonies that were sometimes at odds” (Buchwald et al., 2009, p. 15). Aside from subtleties of body and tone, environments, atmospheres and temporalities can also be noted and incorporated into video diary analysis. Video diaries are often used in combination with other qualitative methods. In my own work I combined them with interviews and journals. One challenge then is not simply how to analyse video diaries, but how to work with them alongside other methods and data.Another challenge is how to write and present video when the work of analysis is done.As Ruth Holliday writes, To capture the ‘flavour’ of the diaries in text is extremely difficult and takes up an enormous amount of writing space […]. Conducting research presentations where clips from the diaries can be show allows a quite different dynamic between diarist/ researcher/audience to come into play. (2004, p. 1615) One writing technique that I have experimented with combines a video still with a detailed description followed by a quotation (Bates, 2015). Developments in electronic publishing have now made it possible to incorporate video in new ways, but the challenges and opportunities of presenting video footage in print, and of working with and between different formats to communicate work, remain largely untapped.

Conclusion This chapter has outlined some of the essential and developing principles and practices of using video diaries as an ethnographic research method. Like the tape-recorder used for recording interviews, the video camera is a recording device that does not necessarily capture reality, but instead opens up possibilities for encountering social life. Both private and very public, video diaries offer opportunities for a more collaborative, compelling, and emotionally engaged research practice that is in touch with the embodied and lived conditions of existence.

References Apelmo, E. (2017). Sport and the female disabled body. London: Routledge. Back, L. (2007). The art of listening. Oxford: Berg. Bates, C. (2019). Vital bodies: living with illness. Bristol: Policy Press. Bates, C. (2015). Intimate encounters: Making video diaries about embodied everyday life. In C. Bates (Ed.), Video methods: Social science research in motion. London: Routledge. Biressi,A., & Nunn, H. (2005). Reality tv: Realism and revelation. London:Wallflower Press. Bloustein, G. (1998).‘It’s different to a mirror ‘cos it talks to you’:Teenage girls, video cameras and identity. In S. Howard (Ed.), Wired-up:Young people and the electronic media. London: UCL Press. Bloustein, G. (2003). Girl making: A cross-cultural ethnography on the processes of growing up female. Oxford: Berghahn Books.

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Video diaries Brown, C., Costley, C., Friend, L., & Varey, R. (2010). Capturing their dream:Video diaries and minority consumers. Consumption, Markets and Culture, 13(4), 419–436. Buchwald, D., Schantz-Laursen, B., & Delmar, C. (2009).Video diary data collection in research with children:An alternative method. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 8(1), 12–20. Buchwald, D., Delmar, C., & Schantz-Laursen, B. (2012). How children handle life when their mother or father is seriously ill and dying. Scandinavian Journal of Caring Sciences, 26, 228–235. Cashmore, A., Green, P., & Scott, J. (2010). An ethnographic approach to studying the student experience: The student perspective through free form video diaries. The International Journal of the First Year in Higher Education, 1(1), 106–111. Cherrington, J., & Watson, B. (2010). Shooting a diary, not just a hoop: Using video diaries to explore the embodied everyday contexts of a university basketball team. Qualitative Research in Sport and Exercise, 2(2), 267–281. Darko, N., & Mackintosh, C. (2016).‘Don’t you feel bad watching the Olympics, watching us?’ A qualitative analysis of London 2012 Olympics influence on family sports participation and physical activity. Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise and Health, 8(1), 45–60. Garrett, B. L., & Hawkins, H. (2015). Creative video ethnographies:Video methodologies of urban exploration. In C. Bates (Ed.), Video methods: Social science research in motion. London: Routledge. Gibson, B. (2005). Co-producing video diaries:The presence of the “absent” researcher. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 4(4), 34–43. Holliday, R. (2000).We’ve been framed:Visualising methodology. The Sociological Review, 48(4), 503–521. Holliday, R. (2004). Filming “the closet”: The role of video diaries in researching sexualities. American Behavioral Scientist, 47(12), 1597–1616. Jones, R. L., Fonseca, J., De Martin Silva, L., Davies, G., Morgan, K., & Mesquita, I. (2014). The promise and problems of video diaries: Building on current research. Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise and Health, 7(3), 395–410. Klein, A., Krane,V., & Paule-Koba, A. L. (2018). Bodily changes and performance effects in a transitioning transgender college athlete. Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise and Health, 10(5), 555–569. Muir, S. (2008). Participant produced video: Giving participants camcorders as a social research method. Real Life Methods Toolkit #04, University of Manchester. Available online: http://eprints.ncrm. ac.uk/541/ Muir, S., & Mason, J. (2012). Capturing Christmas:The sensory potential of data from participant produced video. Sociological Research Online, 17(1), 47-65. Nash, M., & Moore, R. (2018). Exploring methodological challenges of using participant-produced digital video diaries in Antarctica. Sociological Research Online, 23(3), 589-605. Noyes,A. (2004).Video diary:A method for exploring learning dispositions. Cambridge Journal of Education, 34(2), 193–209. Pini, M., & Walkerdine,V. (2011). Girls on film:Video diaries as ‘autoethnographies’. In P. Reavey (Ed.), Visual methods in psychology: Using and interpreting images in qualitative research. London: Routledge. Pocock, N., & McIntosh, A. (2013). Long-term travellers return, ‘home’? Annals of Tourism Research, 42, 402–424. Rich, M., & Chalfen, R. (1999). Showing and telling asthma: Children teaching physicians with visual narrative. Visual Studies, 14(1), 51–71. Rich, M., & Patashnick, J. (2002). Narrative research with audiovisual data:Video intervention/prevention assessment (VIA) and NVivo. International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 5(3), 245–261. Rich, M. (2004). Health literacy via media literacy: Video intervention/prevention assessment. American Behavioral Scientist, 48(2), 165–188. Sinha, S., & Back, L. (2014). Making methods sociable: Dialogue, ethics and authorship in qualitative research. Qualitative Research, 14(4), 473–487. Taylor,A. (2015). “It’s a relief to talk…”: Mothers’ experiences of breastfeeding recorded in video diaries. Unpublished PhD thesis, Bournemouth University. Threadgold, T. (2000). When home is always a foreign place: Diaspora, dialogue, translations. Communal/ Plural, 8(2), 193–217.

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12 FEMINIST AND QUEER APPROACHES Molly Merryman

Ethnographic film and video (with its related written scholarship) have evolved from its pioneering roots as cinematic entertainment (such as Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North) and as an advanced field note device in the service of ethnographic inquiry (rooted in the pioneering work of Mead and Bateson), to its current status as a form of academic dissemination used in multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary social science and humanities scholarship. Although ethnographic film/video methodologies share comparable characteristics with feminist and queer theory based methodologies—including commitments to collaboration and subjectivity, and an outsider status within the confines of the academy—there is a paucity of feminist and queer ethnographic films/videos and feminist and queer perspectives in writings about ethnographic films and videos. As a consequence, ethnographic film and video too often overlook rather than reveal complex cultural structures and performances of gender and sexuality. Despite the pioneering role of Margaret Mead in both ethnographic film and feminist anthropology, there also is an absence of gender and sexuality scholars in the field of ethnographic film and video.And while there is a defined canon of published scholarship on feminist ethnography, the boundaries and tenets of queer ethnography are still being established. It is my intention in this chapter to outline some of the comparable characteristics and foundational critiques that feminist and queer scholars have brought forward regarding ethnographic approaches. Such critiques address the erasure of feminist and queer subjects from ethnographic film/video and explore the absence of feminist and queer scholars from the small community of scholars who utilize ethnographic film/video-based methodologies. I will conclude by offering a beginning formulation of what a queer feminist ethnographic filmic methodology can look like and will address how scholars who practice ethnographic film/video methodologies can support queer and feminist work.

Ethnographic film and video For the purposes of this analysis, I am narrowly delineating ethnographic film/video as a form of scholarly dissemination in which a trained ethnographer uses film and/or video equipment in order to record, edit, and produce a filmic construct that is on its own the dissemination of a scientific study of people and cultures as well as a depiction of their visual and auditory lifeworld. This is categorically different from video ethnography, which uses video as a field tool to sup126

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port written ethnographic analysis. I also view ethnographic film/video as different from documentary film productions that arise out of purely journalistic, commercial, or artistic intentions without any scholarly interrogation or deep immersion with their subjects.And to be clear, I am not inferring that all films and videos made outside of academic involvement are by definition not ethnographic—only that ethnographic film/video utilizes certain observational methods intended to provide direct observation that isn’t represented in all films about human subjects. Ethnographic film/video scholars utilize systematic and interpretive methods of data collection, and are creating “academic homes” for themselves in scholarly associations such as the International Visual Sociology Association and the Society for Visual Anthropology section of the American Anthropological Association (both of which host peer-reviewed film screenings in their annual meetings), and the Journal of Video Ethnography, the first journal of ethnographic film, which had as a founding goal the establishment of rigorous scholarly review of film and video that uses social scientific perspectives and methods. Additionally, makers of ethnographic film/video disseminate their work in a variety of annual film festivals, including those specific to ethnographic film, such as the Margaret Mead Film Festival, held at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City and the Ethnografilm Festival held at Cine’ 13 in Paris.

Feminist and queer theories and methods Feminist theory is a theoretical/philosophical model of thinking that aims to define and understand gender inequality. It is the scholarly adaptation of feminism, which is a broad range of ideas and movements intended to describe and achieve gender equality. Feminist theory is often associated with the study of women because of its early roots focused on women’s suffrage, because it effectively deals with the absence and even erasure of women, and because its core texts were focused on women. However, contemporary feminist theory has redefined earlier concepts of sex and gender, opening up an inquiry about gender inequality that includes men/masculinity, moves beyond essentialist frameworks of gender binaries, and provides an expansive understanding of both gender and sexuality. Feminist methodologies are varied, but can be categorized as scientific methods that utilize feminist theory to challenge the notion of positivistic scientific reasoning and explore how a feminist standpoint can not only be used to study women and gender inequality, but can challenge biases in research and bring about social change. In other words, a feminist method is not the application of traditional positivistic research to look at women’s lives—it is a distinct reimagining of method in order to see and understand the complexities of many different women’s lives in a system of gender inequality. Queer theory is rooted in feminist deconstructionist critical thinking that explores the social norms and power relations connected to sexuality and gender identities. It arose from both the fields of Women’s Studies and LGBTQ Studies and explores the social constructions of gender and sexuality from cross-cultural and multiple identity perspectives. While it is connected with understanding those who are marginalized and oppressed based on sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) markers, it is also focused on deconstructing and rethinking cultural norms, particularly those associated with sexuality. Queer methodologies invoke queer theories and perspectives in scientific research, which is a tangible shift from the positivistic methodologies used in early iterations of LGBT scholarship. In its origins, scholars of LGBT Studies used traditionally accepted methods of inquiry to establish gay and occasionally lesbian, bisexual, and transgender subjects of inquiry in efforts to claim sexuality and gender identity as fixed categories. Queer theory now interrogates assumptions of the immovability of sexuality and gender identity, instead arguing that these categories are fluid, dynamic, and related to oppression and discrimination. 127

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Feminist and queer scholarship includes foundational work on filmic representations, including critiques of ethnographic film/video.Additionally (and largely motivated because of exclusion from mainstream film festivals and distribution channels), there exist feminist and queer film festivals and distribution channels. Of particular note are Women Make Movies, a distribution and production assistance organization founded in 1972 and based in New York City, and Frameline, which includes both the San Francisco International LGBTQ+ Film Festival started in 1972 and its distribution arm, which was established in 1981. Increasingly, academic scholarship is integrating feminist and queer work under an umbrella of gender and sexuality studies. Both feminist and queer scholarship is concerned with the fluid and culturally varying boundaries and intersections of gender and sexuality, with the positivist roots of the original LGBTQ scholarship being replaced with feminist influenced queer methodologies. Considering that this shift is happening at the same time that the use of ethnographic film/video as a scholarly tool is coming into its maturity, this chapter will be integrating feminist and queer foundations and critiques to discuss ethnographic film/video through a more expansive gender and sexuality framework.

Comparable characteristics and foundational critiques Ethnographic film/video shares several characteristics with feminist/queer theories and methods, of which I will discuss just two: collaborative relationships and subjectivity. Of critical importance to ethnographic film/video as well as to feminist and queer methodologies is relationship, the collaboration between the researcher and the research subject.While ethnographers employ consistent, careful, and systematic methods in their work, they are also engaged in interpretive analysis. Furthermore, the nature of ethnography and ethnographic film/video is that it is intimate; it is work that relies on connection, communication, and relationships long before cameras begin capturing action in the field. Within ethnographic film scholarship, the concept of shared work is often associated with Jean Rouch, who called his process “anthropologie partagee” and included both feedback processes and “efforts to train the people he worked with in the technologies of film production” (Berthe, 2018, p. 271). It should be noted that despite his feedback process and longtime collaboration with Nigerian healer Damouré Zika (as a production partner and actor in Rouch’s ethno-fictions), Rouch’s work is contested and criticized as representing and supporting colonial structures and thinking (Berthe, 2018, p. 273). Feminist post-colonial work moved this critique from the anti-Colonial approach most famously articulated by Senegalese filmmaker and author Ousmane Sembene when he accused Rouch of looking at Africans “as through we are insects” (Amad, 2013, p. 49). For example, in positioning the need for feminist and queer methods, England (2004, p. 314) writes that the “academic gaze can reproduce hierarchies of knowledge and power that may limit or erase other ways of knowing.” England further notes that in this practice, scholars must be mindful of the power and privilege imbued in social characteristics according to multiple subject positions including gender, race, and sexuality (England, 2004, p. 314). While more recent scholarship recognizes the subjective power and control held by directors of documentary, Margaret Mead and other early pioneers of ethnographic film wanted the camera to serve as an objective tool. In writing about the work of Mead and Gregory Bateson, Paul Henley notes that “the ideal was to use the cine-camera as a recording instrument and in as objective a manner as possible, so it could act as a control on human observer bias” (Henley, 2013, p. 101). But cameras still depend on the filmmaker to place them in the field, aim them at specific people, spaces, and actions, and record and stop the camera. These are all subjective 128

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actions decided upon by the filmmaker-scholar and not the participants. Furthermore, as the production moves into editing, the filmmaker-scholar makes further decisions about what is included and what is excluded, how scenes are time ordered or juxtaposed against one another, how pivotal events are shortened and shaped, and how and why literally thousands of decisions are made regarding the inclusion, positioning, and revelation of every second within a completed film. As a scholar and filmmaker, Lorenzo Ferrarini embraces a first person approach that stresses interaction and intersubjectivity, something he terms “enactive filmmaking.” Ferrarini notes the presence of the documentary filmmaker “in front of or behind the camera, and/or as a voiceover” (Ferrarini, 2017, p. 131). Shared relationships are of vital importance to scholarly filmmakers, particularly those who approach their subjects through a feminist lens. In her reflective piece about her experiences with making the 2002 documentary about sex workers in Calcutta, Shohini Ghosh writes:“Filmmaking is and should be a negotiation between the filmmaker and his/her subject” (Ghosh, 2006, p. 342). Within feminist and queer scholarship, different collaborative methods are used in attempts to eliminate or reduce the blinders that privilege the backgrounds and assumptions (personal as well as disciplinary) of the field researcher. Feedback and attentive relationships with subjects are the norm in feminist research. As ethnographer Kia M. Q. Hall notes, the use of feminist grounded theory in ethnography allows the scholar to work with multiple perspectives that arise when one is attentive to and collaborating with research participants as well as assistants and other field collaborators (Hall, 2014). Questions of who can and should control interviews and observations are commonplace in queer research as well. Elsbeth Brown, noted for pioneering work in queer oral history, observes the issue of control is also central to my oral history work, which is really a form of collaboration. I’ve been very influenced by feminist and queer critiques of oral history and ethnography as methodologies, and I do what I can to allow the narrator’s control over the process. (Brown and Davidson, 2015, p. 189) For decades, some feminist scholars of ethnography have critiqued ethnographic films for objectifying, misunderstanding, or erasing women from their depictions, while others have speculated on whether it is ever possible to engage in feminist ethnographic filmmaking. In Housewives of the Forest, Sharon Tiffany and Kathleen Adams offer a feminist analysis of the Yanomamo series of ethnographic films by Timothy Asch and Napoleon Chagnon that lays bare the misrepresentations, oversights, errors, and erasures of women and their experiences throughout the films and companion writings. Noting that the women are presented as “images of undifferentiated womanhood,” they write: “Yanomamo women are, in effect, housewives without the trappings of civilization. … (T)he message is that all women are the same: housewives nurture others, focus on their bodies, and keep their minds and mouths closed” (Tiffany and Adams, 1996, p. 183). Similar critiques have been leveled at the films made by Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead, revealing that the co-created films lack the feminism, sophistication, and nuance of her written work about sex and gender.While Mead longed for the camera to be a tool of cine-observation of people’s unfettered cultural interactions, Bateson, like many of ethnographic filmmakers of their era, would stage and recreate cultural practices, sometimes to fit the expectations and desires of Western cinema viewers. For example, in Trance and Dance in Bali, Bateson’s recreations of ritual dances notably replaced old women with young (Henley, 2013, p. 96)). Recreations and other cinematic manipulations are at the heart of Judith Stacey’s influential article “Can There 129

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Be a Feminist Ethnography?” Rather than celebrating the relationships inherent within ethnographic work, Stacey notes that because ethnographic research relies on these relationships it is particularly prone to reproducing inequality and exploitation and thereby exposing research subjects to manipulation by the ethnographer (Stacey, 1988). In a stark departure from this aesthetic replacement of women, much of feminist ethnography works to understand the meaning of women in a cultural and historical framework as well as to interrogate the absence of women from specific social stages. Thus, the positioning of women and their roles in ethnography can highlight cultural understandings of gender constructions within a specific historic moment (Visweswaran, 1997, p. 593). And the absence of women from ethnography provides critical insight into “what is not seen, unnoticed or invisible” within specific cultures (England, 2004, p. 310).

Examples of feminist and queer ethnography in film and video These feminist and queer theoretical concepts and methodologies are expressed in a variety of ways in ethnographic film and video, depending on cinematic structure and subject matter. In this section, I am going to return to the two constructs discussed in the previous section (shared collaboration and subjectivity), and provide examples of how these are realized in ethnographic film and video. To avoid seeming as though I am attempting to create a canonical list of exemplary queer and feminist ethnographic filmmakers or documentaries, I am going to instead select three relatively recent documentaries that demonstrate key feminist and queer theoretical and methodological components.Two of these documentaries are made by scholars whose work is cited in this chapter, one whose work is situated within feminism, the other within queer studies.The third documentary provides an example of an ethnography of the self, a type of documentary that is increasingly common among queer and trans filmmakers (and notably includes amateur work shared through social media), although this film was professionally produced by a notable queer film scholar. Tales of the Night Fairies was produced in 2002 by communication professor Shohini Ghosh. An examination of the sex workers rights movement in New Dehli, Tales immerses itself within the Durbar Women’s Collective Committee, comprised of women (and some men) who as sex workers struggle to expand rights and protect the lives of those within their industry. By focusing on five of these activists, the film provides a nuanced representation of activists who are sex workers, systematically dismantling cultural misunderstandings about women and sexuality. Writing about her experience in making the documentary, Ghosh notes that her motivations include representing the perspectives and opinions of sex workers, whom she notes were almost always absent from the feminist debates being created about them at seminars and conventions (Ghosh, 2006, p. 341). Madistan: Reflections on Indian Manhood was released in 2014 by visual anthropologist and director Harjant Gill. It offers vital insight into the rampant gang rapes and public sexual assaults in India by providing subjective and immersive interviews with four Indian men of varying ages, sexual orientations, economic classes, and educational backgrounds.The result is a sophisticated analysis of toxic masculinity and a nuanced depiction that heightens the stereotypical ways Indian men are too often presented in film. By positioning the individual subjectivity of the four men as central, Gill teases out the complexities of assuming an Indian male identity and the damaging consequences of enforced masculinity on men. In a decidedly feminist decision, the role of the “talking head” expert is assumed by a woman, feminist writer and professor Nivedita Menon of Jawaharial Nehru University in New Dehli. 130

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A different approach to subjectivity—that of subjectivity of the self—is spotlighted in Jenni Olson’s 2015 documentary, The Royal Road. For more than 30 years, Olson has been a leading LGBTQ film curator and historian. The Royal Road is an ethnography of self; a pastiche of 16 mm travel footage with an autobiographical voiceover that synthesizes the autobiographical self through queer theorizing that projects an identity shaped as much by Hollywood film as by sexuality. The film is a fascinating expression of queer theory, and it creates a queer life story that is both disconnected from the body and grounded in desire. This is slow film at its best, combining static shots, barely moving cinematic images with a monotone monologue that layers stories of colonization, manifest destiny, Hollywood romanticism, and unrequited love—all from a destabilizing queer perspective.

The relative absence of feminist and queer scholars in ethnographic filmmaking It should not be surprising that women/feminist and LGBTQ/queer subjects are largely absent or misrepresented in ethnographic film and video: women/feminist and LGBTQ/queer scholars and directors are significantly underrepresented in both academia and filmmaking and therefore are significantly underrepresented in the small subfield of ethnographic film and video. Despite universities placing attention on diversifying the professoriate, the academic sector of university employment has not made the same gains as have professional staff in higher education. In reports issued by the TIAA Institute and the European University Institute, US and European colleges and universities are found to have only become slightly more diverse over the past decades, with a significant gender gap existing in higher valued roles (European University Institute, 2017 and TIAA Institute, 2016). Of particular importance is that most of the gains made by women have been in adjunct and teaching positions rather than in research positions with only a tiny fraction of the highest-ranked faculty positions being held by women, making faculty employment more stratified in general and more perilous for women. Comprehensive data on LGBTQ identified faculty is non-existent, but given that in the United States and many other countries outside of the European Union there are no national laws offering comprehensive employment or educational protections on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, it is easy to infer that SOGI minorities are not any better off.1 Ethnographic film and video scholarship is perched on the margins of acceptance within the academy, with both visual anthropology and visual sociology—along with other visual subdisciplines—still perceived as “fringe” or subsets of “accepted” scholarship. Flagship journals in visual sociology and visual anthropology do not hold the same rankings as do more mainstream disciplinary journals, and despite the fact that a few journals now welcome video-based submissions, these submission practices are so new that knowledge about them has not spread into wide acceptance among those making hiring, tenure, and promotion decisions or those involved in ranking research grant applications. As a result, it is difficult if not dangerous for early- and mid-career faculty as well as for graduate students to engage in a form of scholarship that is still emerging.The 1970’s and 1980’s represented a period when traditional academic structures were being challenged. It is during this time that feminist and critical race scholarship were established, and the first LGBT Studies classes were taught at American universities. The establishment of the National Women’s Studies Association came in 1977. The International Visual Sociology Association was founded in 1981. The Society for Visual Anthropology became a sub-group of the American Anthropological Association in 1984. But in the 30+ years since these shifts, employment patterns for faculty have constricted and the bars for tenure and promotion increasingly have been raised and linked to external measurements such as journal rankings.These demographic, employment, and cultural factors all send messages 131

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to aspiring scholars to engage in non-risky forms of scholarship.These messages are particularly onerous to women, racial, and SOGI minorities who already are at a statistical disadvantage in the professoriate, particularly so in research positions. Commercial filmmaking demonstrates similar patterns related to the exclusion of women and minorities. In 2018, only 8 percent of film directors were women and 10 percent were people of color (Women and Hollywood, Directors Guild of America, 2018). Even in documentary film, where budgets are lower and representations are higher, the numbers are higher but still bleak, with a 36 percent representation of women and a 12 percent representation of racial/ ethnic minorities (Center for Media and Social Impact, 2018). And just as with higher education, there is no systematic documentation of the representation of film directors who identify as LGBTQ and no reason to believe there is equality, despite the rise in popularity of LGBTQ film festivals and LGBTQ content streams in independent film festivals. The diversity renaissance that was predicted with the creation of less expensive digital cameras and streaming services has not happened. At the end of the 1991 documentary about the making of Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola said that people who normally wouldn't make movies are going to be making them. And you know, suddenly, one day some little fat girl in Ohio is going to be the new Mozart, you know, and make a beautiful film with her little father's camera recorder. (Heart of Darkness, 1991) In the nearly 30 years since this was seen, this quote was used time and again to substantiate predictions of the democratizing of filmmaking through digital tools and internet distribution— all the while overlooking the absence of women behind the camera, the double standard and damage related to unrealistic expectations for women’s bodies, and the continued disparaging of Ohio in film and media industry as “fly-over” country. Perhaps Coppola unintentionally revealed the reason why women remain the most underrepresented group in filmmaking, when he noted that the “fat little girl in Ohio” needs to use her father’s camera. The control of the technology, employment and distribution of films—in Hollywood, on broadcast and streaming platforms, and in the academy—remains the domain of white, straight men.

Conclusion: imagining a queer feminist ethnographic film and video methodology Gender and sexuality scholarship, which draws from both feminist and queer theories and methodologies, addresses dynamics of power in social interactions and structures, with feminist theory addressing this by starting with an analysis of women and gender, and queer theory beginning with an analysis of sexuality and norms. Ethnographic film/video scholarship is particularly suited for discovering, revealing, documenting, and interpreting complex social interactions, but because its practitioners are overwhelmingly straight white men who lack feminist and queer theoretical and methodological training, too often ethnographic film/video is blind to the dynamics, realities, struggles, prohibitions, and violence imposed on the bodies and minds of women and sexual minorities. Scholarly filmmaking is a form of research that in its core is focused on seeing, hearing, and using mediation in the form of editing and production to present the captured sights and sounds to the viewer. Feminist and queer theories and approaches can be considered in the same way that a filmmaker selects lenses and microphones: the right tools selected to reveal the truths at hand. And in the same way that an improper lens (or setting) will only capture darkness, field 132

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researchers who lack feminist lenses or queer lenses will not see and thus not aim their cameras to capture the truths in front of them. In its most reductive yet foundationally important approach, feminist and queer ethnographic film and video can and should be focused on revealing subjects and stories that have been hidden (both deliberately and through neglect).Women and queer people, as well as feminist and LGBTQ issues are substantially underrepresented in ethnographic film and video.Written feminist ethnographies of the 1970’s and 1980’s provided clear insight into previously forbidden topics including but not limited to sexual assault, domestic violence, and forced domesticity while the first queer written ethnographies in the 1990’s challenged heteronormative constructions of the nuclear family. Because of the unique ability of ethnographic film and video to capture and display sensory nuances that might be difficult to explain in written scholarships, feminist and queer ethnographic film and video can reveal subtle articulations of the cultural performances women and SOGI minorities play (both willingly and not). A camera can capture the movement of an eye, a shift in speech, or change in movement that conveys intimidation, strength, resistance, capitulation, etc. A significant concern among feminist and queer scholars, particularly those influenced by post-colonial work, is the appropriation of the lives of underrepresented people by those who have more power and access. Kamala Visweswaran notes that “from the genre of feminist testimonial, recent feminist ethnography has elaborated a concern with ‘giving voice’ to its subjects,” but goes on to note Nancy Scheper-Hughes’ 1992 proclamation that “‘there is still a role for the ethnographer-writer in giving voice, as best she can, to those who have been silenced.” (Visweswaran, 1997, p. 614). Given the significant underrepresentation of women and minorities from both scholarly and filmmaking circles, it is vital that scholars who create ethnographic films and videos seek out subjects who are women and LGBTQ, but it essential that this work be done using approaches grounded in feminism and queer theory so as to be complicit in creating the next “housewives of the jungle.” Another approach for feminist and queer ethnographic film and video is to structure scholarship around thematic concerns, such as gender inequality and the consequences of sexual norms. For this approach, the human subjects do not necessarily have to be women or LGBTQ—gender inequality can be reflected through the experiences of boys and men, and social constructions of sexual norms can be queered (challenged) through depictions of heterosexual and cisgender people. In her discussion of feminist ethnography, Kamala Visweswaran argues that because feminist ethnography places a focus on social inequality the work extends beyond simply examining the lives of women.The ethnographic film scholar Harjant Gill, writes about the struggles he has getting his documentaries about gay men researched, filmed, produced, and released in India, which in turn had convinced him that “undertaking such efforts is a radical act in itself ” (Gill, 2017, p. 72). Both feminist and queer methodologies encourage different and more egalitarian approaches to fieldwork, approaches that destabilize the central authority of the researcher through reflection, empowering of subjects, co-learning, and co-facilitating. It is of tantamount importance that those who have the freedom and visibility of being research professors with tenure (and particularly those who have risen to the ranks of full professor) partner with those who do not, whether they be junior and adjunct faculty, graduate students, independent scholars, community activists, or research participants. Furthermore, those of us who have positions of privilege in universities, as academic journal editors and reviews, on agency grant committees, and in scholarly associations need to create pathways for future scholars to successfully engage in the making of feminist and queer ethnography films and videos. 133

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By invoking feminist and queer theories and methodologies, researchers who employ ethnographic film/video methodologies can better explore and understand the complicated ways that gender and sexuality norms, differences and enforced inequalities, impact the bodies, lived experiences, and interactions of individuals. Cultural regulations of gender and sexuality are infused in all aspects of society. Furthermore, by understanding how feminist, post-colonial, and queer theories articulate shared scholarly values such as commitments to collaboration and subjectivity, film/video ethnographers will have more tools available for fieldwork and production. And finally, since ethnographic filmmakers, feminist scholars, and queer scholars share outsider status within the confines of the academy, there is much that can be learned, shared, and supported.

Note 1 And as the director of one of the handful of Gender and Sexuality programs in the United States, I can attest that there are a significant number of experienced, credentialed, and capable queer and feminist scholars who exist in the margins of university employment, desperate for even adjunct or other parttime employment.

References Amad, P. (2003).Visual riposte: Looking back at the return of the gaze as postcolonial theory’s gift to film studies. Cinema Journal, 52(3), 49–74. Baer, F., Hickenlooper, G., & Coppala, E. (1991). Hearts of darkness:A filmmaker’s apocalypse [Motion picture]. American Zoetrope United States. Berthe, J. (2018). Beyond the entomological critique: Re-thinking Rouch and African cinema. L.Astorian Studies in French Cinema,Volume 18, Issue 3267–270. Brown, E., & Davidmann, S. (in conversation). (2015). Queering the trans* family album. Radical History Review, 2015(122), 188–200. Center for Media & Social Impact. (2018). Documentary film diversity report. Retrieved May 1, 2019 from http://cmsimpact.org/report/journey-academy-awards-2018-documentary-film-diversity-report/ Directors Guild of America. (2018). DGA Publishes Feature Film Inclusion Report: Study Reveals Feature Film Director Diversity Remained Low in 2017 Retrieved May 1, 2019 from https://www.dga.org/ News/PressReleases/2018/180621-Feature-Film-Director-Diversity-Remained-Low-in-2017.aspx England, J. (2004). Disciplining subjectivity and space: Representation, film and its materials effects. Antipode:A Radical Journal of Geography, 36(2), 295–321. European University Institute. (2017). Gender Comparisons. Retrieved July 7, 2019 from https://www.eui .eu/ProgrammesAndFellowships/AcademicCareersObservatory/CareerComparisons/GenderCompa risons Ferrarini, L. (2017). Enactive filmmaking: Rethinking ethnographic cinema in the first person. Visual Anthropology Review, 33(2), 130–140. Ghosh, S. (2006).Tales of the nightfairies:A filmmaker’s journey. Inter-Asian Cultural Studies, 7(2), 341–343. Gill, H. (2017). Censorship and ethnographic film: Confronting state bureaucracies, cultural regulation, and institutional homophobia in India. Visual Anthropology Review, 33(1), 62–73. Hall, K. (2014). Using constructionist grounded theory and feminist ethnography to enhance the capabilities approach. Journal of Ethnographic and Qualitative Research, 8(3), 128–143. Henley, P. (2013). From documentaries to representation: Recovering the films of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson. Visual Anthropology, 26(2), 75–108. Stacey, J. (1988). Can there be a feminist ethnography? Women’s Studies International Forum, 11(1), 21–24. TIAA Institute.Taking the Measure of Faculty Diversity. (2016). Retrieved May 1, 2019 from https://ww w.tiaainstitute.org/publication/taking-measure-faculty-diversity Tiffany, S., & Adams, K. (1996). Housewives in the forest: Representation in ethnographic film. Women’s Studies, 25(2), 160–188. Visweswaran, K. (1997). Histories of feminist anthropology. Annual Review of Anthropology, (26), 591–621. Women and Hollywood. 2018 Statistics. (2018). Retrieved May 1, 2019 from https://womenandholl ywood.com/resources/statistics/2018-statistics/

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PART 3

Developing genres and styles

Part 3 Introduction Part 3 of the handbook contains five chapters, each featuring a distinct ethnographic film genre. To be sure, no one is suggesting that there are only five genres of ethnographic film or that the genres presented here are the main ones.This part of the book simply tries to give readers just the feel of a few alternatives.To this effect, the chapters included in Part 3 survey distinct traditions, highlight key foundational figures, and lay out the terrain that anyone interested in cultivating unique styles is likely to navigate. We begin with Peter Biella’s chapter on i-docs. I-docs, or interactive documentaries, have a rich tradition in the university classroom but in his comprehensive and detailed overview Biella shows us that interactive documentaries have become increasingly diverse in terms of the technologies they rely on, the topics they treat, and therefore the audiences they target. One of the key challenges of i-docs, Biella remarks, is changing technologies. As new opportunities arrive and expand, old platforms become obsolete, with the risk that they will become inaccessible. Biella’s own long personal history with the production of i-docs makes Chapter 13 rich with intimate insights and priceless reflections. Now, let’s face it, most of us ethnographic filmmakers are camera geeks.We could talk forever about our cameras, our lenses, and our filters.We, perhaps, even lecture students about framing and image composition. Maybe we have also written articles about visual aesthetics. And some of us even call ourselves visual ethnographers. In all of this, unfortunately sound matters often end up taking a back seat. In Chapter 14 Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier turns the table upside down and focuses on sound first and foremost, engaging us to become more sensitive to the aural dimensions of our work. Combining reflections on aural matters with practical attention to the process of recording sound, Chapter 14 stresses the importance of becoming as savvy about audio as we are about video.After all, as we all know, audiences may forgive the occasional bad shot, but are never forgiving about bad audio. Chapter 15 focuses on documentary hybrids. In a provocative and compelling piece, as detailed as is convincing, Ferrarini asks us to re-imagine the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction, forcing us to ponder on the status of reality in ethnographic film. In the genre of documentary hybrids, he writes, the boundaries of fiction are intentionally blurred. Hybrid films leave their audience uncertain over the factual status of what they watch, develop ambiguity by

Developing genres and styles

purposefully and skillfully using media art, performance, enactment, and deception. In doing so this genre defies classifications and troubles knowledge and truth claims. Do me a favor if you will. Google “ethnographic films.” What you will find is a list of old classics of the tradition and very little beyond them. Now, watch a few if you can find them, maybe on Kanopy or through your university library collection.Without a doubt you will find that most of those films are characterized by a minimalist aesthetic, if any explicit aesthetics are present at all. Now compare those films with some of the newest classics of ethnographic film. Some of the elements are the same: long observational takes, a distinct phenomenological orientation, an emic point of view, a slow pace. But something else will jump at you as you watch the newer classics: a distinct, purposive, and even strategic focus on the sensory dimensions of a lifeworld. As Kasic writes in Chapter 16, many contemporary ethnographic films and some of the most successful recognize the importance of the sensuous potential of film, an approach that fuses the sensory with the cognitive through heightened sound design, a haptic feel, and a greater use of interviews or personal viewpoints.This is the genre that in her chapter Kasic calls sensory verité. In the last chapter of Part 3, Chapter 17, Harris focuses on the genre of ethnocinema. Ethnocinema is a non-representational video-based research methodology that thrives in intercultural exchange and video as event rather than artifact. Rooted in more-than-representational video methods ethnocinema cultivates an exchange between researcher and researched as a creative collaboration, troubling identities of filmmakers and film subjects, and challenging truthclaims about individuals, collectives, and fixities. Ethnocinema is a critical inquiry. The genre interrogates the commodification and corporatization of digital practices in favor of a practice of video-as-relationship, and in doing so problematizes binary notions of public/ private and visual/discursive knowledge creation, thus encouraging a politics of post-representation.

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13 INTERACTIVE MEDIA Peter Biella

In anthropology and cognate disciplines, digital technologies have been used primarily to exploit qualities of analog media that have been undervalued. Margaret Mead (1975) condemned anthropology's indifference to data-close ethnographic records while extolling the virtues of analog film, photography, and audio recordings. Sorenson, of the National Anthropological Film Center, continued the struggle to legitimate audio-visual recordings. He reminded anthropologists that analog media can “be examined and reexamined for details and relationships too subtle, fleeting, or complex to be detected in the real time of daily life” (Sorenson, 1975, p. 267). Howard (1988) advanced the argument further. He took the offensive, claiming that textual ethnographies forced anthropological readers “into a passive mode […] helpless to explore questions that might be of special interest to oneself, to seek other avenues of connection” (Howard, 1988, p. 305).This Kuhnian critique asserted that written texts promote paradigm blindness.The “other avenues of connection” that transcend such bias, Howard argued, could be investigated with large quantities of data-close interactive media. They reduced bias by allowing anthropologists to conduct virtual fieldwork, unconstrained by the space limitations and theoretical preconceptions of print-based ethnography. My contribution to the legitimation struggle was to show that non-linear media were valuable to anthropology because they promoted scholarly research (Biella, 1993). Scholars exploit many non-linear tools to which the main text of a book is linked, such as footnotes, index, table of contents, and bibliography.These tools have been stable and universally accepted for centuries and, occasionally, new non-linear devices are added to the scholarly toolkit. This was the case with page numbers, invented in 1470 (Febvre, Martin, and Martin, 1958).As part of my contribution I argued that digital interactivity added page numbers to time-based media, overcoming the last impediment to visual scholarship in anthropology. My argument was correct as far as it went, but it ignored the fact that it was tied to the modernist paradigm which was then falling out of favor. Most anthropologists were less interested in data-close visual scholarship than I was. Over time, they invented ways for interactive media to serve different paradigmatic goals of visual anthropology and ethnography. The following section, Interactive Media in Anthropology, describes how early and recent interactive applications in anthropology have used non-linear juxtapositions and digital interruptions to advance valuable insights of many different kinds.The Modes of Interactivity section presents a global overview of interactive media, suggesting many new directions for ethnographic productions. 137

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Interactive media in anthropology: 1985–2018 Alan Macfarlan’s The Nagas of the Assam-Burma Border (1985–2001, 1992) is the earliest collection of digital media produced by an anthropologist. Originally on laserdisc—now on the web—the project contains hundreds of diaries, letters, and books (dating from 1853); thousands of photographs (from 1873); and hundreds of film clips (from 1930 to 1970). The creation of a large, searchable, digital archive is Macfarlane’s contribution to the history of interactive media in anthropology. Modest in scale but also ground-breaking is Brenda Farnell's Wiyuta: Assiniboine Storytelling with Signs (1995a).This CD does not contain much data, nor is its level of interactivity complex. It is significant as anthropology’s first interactive application dedicated to the close linking of real-time video, graphics, and text. The expository foci are video recordings of Lakota Elders, each telling stories in the Nakota language while simultaneously recounting them in Plains Indian sign talk. As the stories are told, each sentence is synced to a graph of Laban script representing the current-moment’s body movements, along with Lakota and English textual transcriptions. Other links give access to maps, photographs, ethno-historical descriptions, a graphic identifying basics of Laban script, and a non-interactive video. The publication of the CD supplemented that of an ethnographic monograph (Farnell, 1995b; cf. Farnell and Huntley, 1995). Yanomamö Interactive, made in 1997, shares Wiyuta’s major goal, the micro-analysis of dataclose ethnographic footage (Biella, Chagnon, and Seaman, 1997). The center of the Yanomamö CD is The Ax Fight, a film by Asch and Chagnon (1975). This film is famous for its Kuhnian skepticism: it interrupts itself five times to propose alternative explanations of a single event. Like Wiyuta, Yanomamö teaches by interrupting and linking time-based media recordings to text-based analyses (see Figure 13.1, bottom row). Seaman divided the film’s 8.5 minute singletake into 168 current moments. For each, he wrote textual exegeses which describe the current on-screen action and give the names of identifiable people. A click on any name initiates a chain of events: an X appears over the chest of the named individual; a text field appears, giving the individual’s vital statistics; and a genealogical chart appears, locating the individual’s family and lineage (see Figure 13.1, lower left). These features are useful but not unusual. Yanomamö Interactive makes its contribution to anthropological scholarship by giving users two different strategies for analyzing the same footage. The first facilitates analysis in the film’s temporal order, with every few seconds interrupted by a textual description. The second allows each individual to be studied in isolation. Yanomamö contains a page for each of the 38 people identified by name in the film (see Figure 13.1, lower right). Each people-page compiles all of the descriptions that include the person named. The isolation of a single person’s actions in the chaos of events facilitates independent research—virtual fieldwork—and sometimes startling (out of paradigm) discoveries (Biella, 2004). Unfortunately, advances in operating systems made Wiyuta and Yanomamö unplayable on contemporary computers. An extreme implementation of Howard’s (1988) call for virtual fieldwork is Maasai Interactive, the media for which I recorded in Tanzania (Biella, 1980–2000). This application contains nine hours of audio tracks divided into 5,600 current-moments, linked to 5,600 transcription-translations and 1,000 ethnographic commentaries.The latter contain 3,000 internal cross-references which the user is invited to explore at will. Implicit in the high degree of interactivity found in Maasai Interactive is the theory of cognitive flexibility (Spiro, Coulson, Feltovitch, and Anderson, 1988). It is premised on the idea that educational hypermedia applications must be adaptive; that is, structured in accordance with the student’s level of expertise. Although beginning learners require rote explanations, advanced learners must learn to think on their feet if they are to analyze ill-structured domains like ethno138

Figure 13.1 Yanomamö Interactive: The Ax Fight. Peter Biella, Napoleon Chagnon, and Gary Seaman (1997). Blow-by-blow descriptions and People screens.

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graphic field sites. In interactive media, cognitive flexibility is developed through the provision of a multitude of optional links that foster and reward non-reductive analysis of “messy” situations (Spiro et al., 1988). Maasai Interactive provided these options, before it too was made unusable by an upgrade in Apple’s operating system. Roderick Coover’s (2003) Cultures in Webs: Hypermedia and the Documentary Image provides interactive anthropology with a different paradigmatic “approach to documentary arts and visual research” (Chouette Collective, 2019, n.p.). The sample screen at the top of Figure 13.2 illustrates the design of Concealed Narratives, a chapter in the CD about Coover's fieldwork in Ghana. It describes how “meanings of collective representations of power are put into play in the cultural imaginary” (Coover, 2004, p. 13).Videos play in real time or slow motion, individually or simultaneously. Each option permits different visual comparisons. The lower half of Figure 13.2 presents part of another chapter, about wine-growing in France. Like Concealed Narratives, the screen contains common web-page attributes, pop-up interviews and rollovers. Yet, despite little interactivity, the screen makes complex cognitive demands. Scrolling either left or right, the chapter contains four parallel channels of information.At the top is a string of 50 black and white photographs; below are three channels of texts: sensory, philosophical, and ethnographic. Coover's four streams interrupt expectations and conflate genre distinctions. Deceptively simple, the application’s meditations and mind-bending juxtapositions made it attractive to experts in the field (Grimshaw, 2008; Pink, 2006;Taylor, 2003).The apparent simplicity may also have made Cultures in Webs adaptive to beginning students who could appreciate the photography as well as less dense textual passages. However, the introduction of HTML 5 made the CD unplayable. Tajen: Interactive is a visual exploration of the Balinese cockfight. Grounded in long-term fieldwork and filmmaking in Bali (Pasquino and Lemelson, 2016), Lemelson and collaborators seek to make Geertz’s (1973) “Deep play” comprehensible and enjoyable to students by contextualizing it in contemporary aspects of the cockfighting phenomenon. The web-based application explores the phenomenon from five perspectives: Man, Cockfight, Blade, Chicken, and Aftermath. As shown in Figure 13.3, each is linked with two to five short videos and with two to six commentaries. Some describe sexual symbolism, addiction to gambling, and “overlooked positive” attributes of the fighting. Others introduce how the cockfight has been analyzed from different paradigms such as functionalism, psychological anthropology, structuralism, interpretivism, and the perspective of global animal rights. The interactivity of the application is limited, but its style is significant for adaptive media education. Tajen combines familiar film styles—sensory, vérité, and talking-heads—with white-board cartoons, tongue-in-cheek montages, and graphic juxtapositions borrowed from Facebook. Lemelson and Young argue that the combination makes Tajen uniquely adapted to students who are savvy in the current media landscape. The work experiments “with wildly diverse modalities, all with the hopes of appealing to anthropologists, students, and general viewers with different learning styles” (Lemelson and Young, 2018, p. 842).Yet little is known about how and which media styles actually benefit different learning styles. Existing research on adaptive media is more concerned with proposing alternative strategies than demonstrating their effectiveness empirically (Akbulut and Cardak, 2012; Magoulas and Chen, 2006). Tajen, released in 2017, is playable on contemporary computers, but its longevity is uncertain and the fact that it caters to transient media preferences places it at risk.Would Boas or Benedict have spent years writing in a medium they had reason to believe would be unreadable within a decade? The problem for interactive media-makers is that we have not developed a stable and 140

Figure 13.2

Cultures in webs. Roderick Coover (2003).Above: a screen from Concealed narratives. Below: a small section of The Harvest's continuous-rolling screen.

Figure 13.3

Tajen: Interactive. Robert Lemelson and Brianna Young (2017).

Interactive media

universally accepted scholarly apparatus to protect us from the vicissitudes of commerce and fashion. The Maribor Uprisings exemplifies an interactive paradigm very different from those described above. Maribor is Razsa's third film about direct action (Razsa and Velez, 2002, 2009). It was made in collaboration with a Slovenian collective organized against political corruption. On a single night, five members of the collective videotaped an uprising from different perspectives. The diversity of the footage made it ideal for Razsa’s branching narrative. At the core of the video are two story lines, represented at the top of Figure 13.4 by the decision tree. Each circle indicates a moment in the video at which the screening is stopped, the story interrupted, and the audience asked to select between paths. The first key decision (see Figure 13.4, upper- and lower-left), binds the audience to one of the alternative narratives. The audience’s later decisions, marked by asterisks, provide background information but do not substantially alter the narrative. Asterisks identified as “2nd key decisions” (see Figure 13.4, upper- and lower-right) are deceptive in the sense that the decisions they require appear to have grave consequences, but in fact do not. Maribor’s importance for anthropological interactivity comes from the way it is screened. Razsa, present at the screenings, uses each decision point as an opportunity to provoke questions about social struggle and collective decision-making. He asks for a majority vote at the first decision point. Later, he instructs a single individual to decide for everyone. Later still, after a group vote, he requests that audience members explain their decisions. Often, after individuals in the audience recount personal experiences of protest and riot, others change their votes. In all of these cases, the choices made by the audience resemble choices of people in uprisings: having to select between alternatives with unknown risks, being deceived by false options, and depending on the probity of strangers (Ranslem, 2017; Uppal and Francoeur, 2017). Demonstrating the resemblance is part of Razsa's interactive agenda. An analogous strategy is used by the Southern African STEPS for the Future initiative. In it, interruptions of film screenings, made by trained facilitators, nurture audience involvement and build commitment to HIV education (Levine and Englehart, 2003). Englehart (2003) fittingly describes one such encounter as “media activism in the screening room.” (For open access to films and facilitator guides, see STEPS, 2015a, 2015b.)

Modes of interactivity 1978–2019 Following is an overview of interactive technologies and applications that innovators have developed over the last 40 years. Many are likely to be unfamiliar to ethnographers.This introduction may inspire them to emulate the examples and create new works whose only drawback—in the words of Maple Razsa—is that they are “preposterously labor intensive and will never make any money” (quoted in Ranslem, 2017, n.p.). Table 13.1 adopts Sandra Gaudenzi’s (2013, pp. 37–70) division of hypermedia into four modes of interactivity: immersive—which enhances the sensual, emotional, or intellectual understanding of a situation; hypertext—which develops awareness by juxtaposing quantities of data in unfamiliar ways; participatory—which collates and shares data from many contributors; and experiential—which enhances other interactive effects through instantaneous feedback in the real world. In Table 13.1, the rows sort 40 interactive applications into the four modes. The left-hand column names each application and gives its release date and a link to its best online version. Six applications— identified with †, * and § icons—meet criteria of two modes. References in The right-hand column discuss the applications. 143

Figure 13.4

The Maribor Uprisings. Maple Razsa and Milton Guillén (2017). Above: decision tree of the completed work. Below: moments interrupted for decisions by the film audience.

Table 13.1 Modes of Interactive Media, 1978–2019 In the left-hand column, application names are sorted The right-hand column identifies academic and according to mode of interaction, genre, and date. other publications related to each application Most are linked to online samples. or its subcategory. Many publications are available online. Immersive VR (viewed on computer screen) 1 Aspen Movie Map—1978; Marti (2006) Anable (2012) 2 Google Street View—2007→; (Techquickie, 2016) 3 Global Conflicts—2007; (SeriousGamesdk, 2007) BBC News (2006) 4 Gone Gitmo—2010; (de la Peña & Weil, 2007) de la Peña (2015);Weil (2013) 5 1000 Cut Journey2018; (Tribeca Film, 2018) Brown Institute (2018); Cogburn (2017) VR 360 (viewed with 3D headsets) 6 Witness 360: 7/7—2015; (Little Star Media, 2019) IDFA DocLab (2015) 7 Collisions—2018; (Coleman, 2016) K. Macfarlane (2017);Wallworth (2015) 8 Hero—2018; (iNK Stories NYC, 2018) Khonsari (2018) Augmented reality (mobile devices) 9 MMORPGS—1996→ †; (MMO Population, 2019) Kelly (2004); Nardi (2010); Bowditch et al. (2018) 10 Google Traffic—2007→ Nations (2018) 11 Pokémon Go—2016→ †; (Official Pokémon, 2015) Pokémon GO Safety Tips (2018); Revell (2017); Aluri (2017) Museum applications 12 British Museum—2017 Walhimer (2017a); Sullivan et al. (2006); Carillo et al. (2010) 13 Met Cloisters—VR—2017; (Metropolitan, 2017) Walhimer (2017b) 14 American Museum of Natural History—2017 Cabero & Borroso (2016);ThinkMobiles (2019) 15 Casa Batlló—AR—2017; (Tseng, 2017) Aluri (2017) Archaeological applications 16 VR Archaeology—2016; (ABC Science, 2016) Fernández-Palacios et al. (2014) 17 Students ‘Visit’—2017; (YaleCampus, 2017) Sikora, Russo, Erek, & Jurčević (2018) Hypertext Educational 18 Victorian Web—1987–2016; (Victorian, 2016) Landow (2018) Anthropological applications 19 The Nagas—1985–2001; (Macfarlane,A., 1985– A. Macfarlane (1992) 1992, 2001) 20 Maasai Interactive—1990–2000 Biella (2009, 2011) 21 Wiyuta—1995 Farnell (1995b); Farnell & Huntley (1995) 22 Yanomamö Interactive—1997 Biella (2004) 23 Cultures in Webs—2003 Taylor (2003); Coover (2004); Pink (2006); Chouette (2019); Grimshaw (2008) 24 Sq’éwlets—2016 * Hennessy & Blake (2014); Doig River (2008) 25 The Maribor Uprisings—2017 *; (Razsa & Guillén, Ranslem (2017); Uppall & Francoeur (2017) 2017) 26 Tajen: Interactive—2017 Lemelson & Young (2018);Tucker (2018) (Continued )

Peter Biella Table 13.1 (Continued ) In the left-hand column, application names are sorted The right-hand column identifies academic and according to mode of interaction, genre, and date. other publications related to each application Most are linked to online samples. or its subcategory. Many publications are available online. Participatory General 27 Wikipedia—2001→ ; (Welcome to Wikipedia, n.d.) Wikipedia Contributors (2019) 28 Archive.org—2006→ ; (Archive.org, 2019a) Archive.org (2019b) 29 7 Billion Others—2003–2014; (Arthus-Bertrand & Arthus-Bertrand (2009);Arthus-Bertrand (2018) The GoodPlanet Foundation, 2014). 30 RiP:A Remix Manifesto–2004–20009; (de Lessig (2008) Bellefeuille, 2008) 31 Biosphere Soundscapes—2007→ Barclay (2015) 32 Flickr GeoTagging—2007→ ; (Flickr, 2019) Photo Mapping (2018) 33 Global Lives Project—2010→ Global Lives (2014) 34 Cities and Memory—2015→ Cities and Memory (2015a, 2015b) Anthropological applications 35 [e]HRAF—1949 → ; (Human Relations Area Kottak (2011); Feldman (2017) Files, 2019). 36 Maasai Migrants—2007→ §; (Biella, 2012) Gubrium & Harper (2013) 37 Quipu Project—2017→ § Brown & Tucker (2017) Participatory archaeology 38 Kansa et al.—2011 Barricelli et al. (2015); BARJ (2019); Experiential Mass Communication 39 Mobile Messenger Apps—1995→ ; (Digital Trends, de Souza e Silva (2006); Chalfaouat (2019) 2019) Virtual communities 40 Rider Spoke—2009 Quigley (2016);Weidle (2019) Hybrid: Apps classified as Experiential that are also Immersive †, Hypertext *, or Participatory § 9 MMORPGS † 11 Pokémon Go † 24 Sq’éwlets * 25 Maribor Uprisings * 36 Maasai Migrants § 37 Quipu Project §

New media must be seen to be understood. Because Table 13.1 contains links to many web resources, for convenience Table 13.1 is hyperlinked in the electronic version of this book.

Immersive mode Immersive interactive media can be divided into three subcategories. Most apps that fall in the Virtual reality category are designed for computer screen viewing, are educational and are relatively low budget.The examples here (numbers 3, 4, 5) deliver their content through firstperson role play. In Gone Gitmo (4), the user experiences life as a prisoner in Guantanamo.The VR (computer screen) subcategory also includes the once-astonishing Google street view (2) and its grandparent, Aspen movie map (1). 146

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VR 360 (headsets) applications tap intense emotions. In (8), for example, goggle-wearing participants are first blinded in a (virtual) bomb attack, then sprayed with real hot dust and wind. Murray (2012) offers a valuable manifesto for VR 360 design. Madary and Metzinger (2016) propose ethical guidelines to reduce the psychological damage that can result from VR overdose. Augmented reality apps (ARs) include Google Traffic, which overlays real-time traffic conditions on fixed maps, and MMORPGs (9)—massively multiplayer online role-playing games. Nandi’s (2010) autoethnography describes her life as a World of Warcraft elf. Pokémon go (11) is discussed below. With notable exceptions (Hennessy, 2019), cultural anthropologists rarely use VR or AR in their research, although the falling cost of the technology will change that. More common are expository uses, especially in museum applications (12–15, 17). Archaeological research with related digital technologies, especially GPS, has existed for a decade (16 and references). Many analog precursors anticipated the astonishment brought on by immersive media. Audiences were shocked by motion in motion pictures (1896), color in colored films (1902), and sound in synchronous sound (1927). Even earlier, when reality was augmented by cave paintings and virtual rebirth in written words, the reaction of those nearby must also have been one of astonishment.

Hypertext mode Applications in this category deliver alternative pathways and multiple juxtapositions of digital resources, often in large collections. Resources stored in hypertext’s early anthropological applications (19–23), written on CDs and laserdiscs, were “closed”: incapable of being changed after release. Landow and his team transcoded Victoria Web (18) from the doomed Storyspace application to HTML. Macfarlane moved the Nagas Project’s (19) texts, films, and photographs from the doomed laserdisc medium to the web, though its interactivity and speed were compromised. When Apple ended support of HyperCard, the software I used for ten years writing Maasai Interactive (20), my work could no longer be viewed. The fate of other pre-2005 projects was the same (21–23). Perhaps we should write our elected representatives: current HTML projects (like 24, 26) should be protected by legislation that requires future versions of HTML to be backward compatible. Sq’éwlets (24) is an important example of how anthropologists can assist in preserving and presenting a community biography. With a concentration on archaeology, the project serves present and future First Nation communities by personifying “places, objects, knowledge and history” (Hennessy and Blake, 2014; cf. Doig River, 2008). Maribor (25), too, has a deep interactive relationship with its audience.

Participatory mode Applications in the participatory mode provide “open” or evolving media resources collected from around the world. Familiar examples in Table 13.1 are Wikipedia (27), with 18 billion hits per month and 580 articles added per day; Flickr GeoTagging (31), with 3.5 million uploads a day; and Archive.org (29), with 350 billion web pages and other large collections. Applications in the participatory mode are diverse. RiP (30) demonstrates once-illegal music sampling. Thousands of global sound recordings, searchable through geolinks, are available in Cities and Memory and Biosphere Soundscapes (31, 34). Global Lives (33) and 7 Billion Others (28) invite filmmakers to collect video portraits from around the world. [e]HRAF (35), anthropology’s 147

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most familiar participatory application, collates data from thousands of ethnographies. Archaeologists reduce the analytical overload of data received from many sources with participatory software like Tarchna DB (38). The Quipu Project (37) makes the participatory mode political: it initiated radio broadcasts of cell-phone testimonies by indigenous Peruvians who were involuntarily sterilized during Fujimori's regime. Maasai Migrants (36) gives access to a digital archive of testimonies about HIV. Analog precursors to participatory-mode activism include the Michaels and Kelly (1984) publication about the advancement of Warlpiri television,Turner's (1990) contributions to Kayapo video networks, and the many projects initiated through Photovoice. (Wang and Burris, 1997)

Experiential mode Experiential technologies allow real-time interaction between mobile users, often distant from each other, whose digital interactions change the world.The most profound examples of these technologies are mobile messenger apps (notably WhatsApp, Facebook messenger, and WeChat), with 4.9 billion users in 2019 (Statista, 2019). Stories of the digital Arab Spring demonstrate the enormous initiative that messaging allows in shaping history (Chalfaouat, 2019). On a smaller scale, Pokémon go (11)—with 800 million users—meets the criteria for both immersive and experiential modes. Unlike messaging, Pokémon allows its players very little genuine initiative. Enormously smaller in scale, but more ingenious and moving for that reason, Pokémon is another locative app that guides users to real world destinations where others have dropped digital messages about their experiences on the same spot (40). Six applications on this list are classified as hybrid experiential. Significantly, the last four are produced with the guidance of anthropologists. Engagement with people in the real world is ethnography’s hallmark feature, and ethnographers’ contribution to interactive media must be to keep it relevant for the communities they wish to know.

Conclusion Immersive technologies are praised for the overwhelming and unprecedented feelings of reality they create. Feelings are important, but they are also historically transient. No viewers fled the theater in 1896 with the first screening of Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat, but the moving images did astonish them.Technologies are abandoned and replaced when the astonishment dulls.Yet for those who use interactive media and want to advance the causes of ethnography, the new technologies contain a malignancy. I lost the years I spent writing 400 pages of computer code when Apple abruptly abandoned its support of HyperCard software. When attributes of once-fresh media become out of date, audiences, especially young ones, may dismiss their educational messages as well (Martinez, 1992). Fashion alters the plausibility of the paradigm.The interactive apparatus of print scholarship has worked for centuries: it is stable and resistant to commerce and fashion. In contrast the interactive media produced before 2005 can no longer play on computers—much less advance the goals of anthropology. The digital revolution of the 1990’s created very attractive tools for the analysis of film. Thirty years later, the revolution has begun to eat its children.

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Interactive media Statista. (2019). Most popular mobile messaging apps worldwide as of January 2019, based on number of monthly active users (in millions). Statista:The Statistics Portal. Retrieved April 15, 2019, from https:// www.statista.com/statistics/258749/most-popular-global-mobile-messenger-apps/ STEPS. (2015a). Films. Steps for the Future. Retrieved January 19, 2020 from http://stepsforthefuture.co.za/ films STEPS. (2015b). Facilitator guides and screening reports. Steps for the Future. Retrieved January 19, 2020 from http://stepsforthefuture.co.za/resources Sullivan, B., Ware, C., & Plumlee, M. (2006). Linking audio and visual information while navigating in a virtual reality kiosk display. Journal of Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia, 15(2), 217–241. Taylor, L. (2003). Suspended in webs of signification: Foreword to Cultures in webs: Working in hypermedia with the documentary image. Roderick Coover. (CD-ROM). Watertown, MA: Eastgate Systems. Retrieved January 19, 2020 from https://unknownterritories.org/reviews/2003-CIW_LUCIENT AYLOR_Forward.pdf Techquickie. (2016). Google street view as fast as possible (Video). Retrieved January 19, 2020 from https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEbMlXNqOQY The Victorian. (2016).What is the Victorian web? Retrieved January 19, 2020 from http://www.victorianweb.org/ ThinkMobiles. (2019).What is augmented reality (AR) and how does it work? Retrieved January 19, 2020 from https://thinkmobiles.com/blog/what-is-augmented-reality/ Tribeca Film Festival. (2018).Virtual arcade: 1000 cut journey. Retrieved January 19, 2020 from https://ww w.tribecafilm.com/filmguide/1000-cut-journey-2018 Tseng, E. (2017).Visual reality tour of Gaudi's Casa Batlló. Retrieved January 19, 2020 from https://ww w.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjDX58xgJEo Tucker,A. (2018). Using multimodality to provide holistic context and promote engaged learning in Tajen: Interactive. Multimodal Anthropologies (6 December). Retrieved January 19, 2020 from http://www.amer icananthropologist.org/2018/12/06/tajen-interactive/ Turner,T. (1990).Visual media, cultural politics, and anthropological practice: Some implications of recent uses of film and video among the Kayapo of Brazil. Commission on Visual Anthropology Review, (Spring), 8–13. Uppal, R., & Francoeur, S. (2017). The Maribor uprisings: A live participatory film. POV: Point of View Magazine (25 May). Retrieved January 19, 2020 from http://povmagazine.com/articles/view/the-mari bor-uprisings-a-live-participatory-film Walhimer, M. (2017a). Museum planner:A blog of museum planning by an experienced museum planner: Creating museum smartphone tours. Retrieved January 19, 2020 from https://museumplanner.org/ creating-museum-smartphone-tours/ Walhimer, M. (2017b). Museum planner:A blog of museum planning by an experienced museum planner: What is museum VR and museum AR? Retrieved January 19, 2020 from https://museumplanner.org /what-is-museum-vr-and-ar/ Wallworth, L. (2015). COLLISIONS:The inaugural virtual reality film from the Sundance Institute New Frontier (Press packet). Retrieved January 19, 2020 from http://www.collisionsvr.com/assets/downl oads/PressNotes_Collisions_WEFDavos_SundanceParkCity_012216.pdf Wang, C., & Burris, M. A. (1997). Photovoice: Concept, methodology and use for participatory needs assessment. Health Education and Behavior, 34(3), 369–387. Weidle, F. (2019). Gaining control over the loss of it: Software as focusing media in digital visual ethnography. Social Anthropology, 27(1), 17–32. Weil, P. (2013). Gone Gitmo: Guantanamo public memory project post. Retrieved January 19, 2020 from http://gonegitmo.blogspot.com/ Welcome to Wikipedia. (n.d.). Main page. Wikipedia,The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved January 19, 2020 from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page Wikipedia Contributors. (2019). Wikipedia: Statistics. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved May 3, 2019, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Statistics YaleCampus. (2017). Students ‘visit’ lost archaeological site in virtual reality. Retrieved January 19, 2020 from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0EVnOqvguQ

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14 SOUND MATTERS Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier

It is easy to forget that cinema is as much about sound as it is about moving images.The French film theorist and composer Michel Chion (1994) defines the false impression that sound is “invisible” or unnecessary to the cinematographic experience as a form of audio-visual illusion. Yet, enjoying a film without its soundtrack represents a mission impossible. More than just an accessory that accompanies the moving images, sounds (including music) generate emotions, stimulate memories, and call for a multisensorial experience.They constitute, along with images, what is understood as the cinematographic experience. Unfortunately, despite the acknowledgment that sound is an essential component of filmmaking, very few ethnographic or documentary filmmakers have given serious attention to sound, be it in practice, from a methodological or theoretical perspective, or in the consideration of the sonic dimensions as contributing to a film narrative (Henley, 2007, p. 55). I address this gap in approaching ethnographic filmmaking from a primarily sonic perspective and in considering all types of sounds as powerful cinematic tools that contribute to a film’s multisensorial experience.This applies not only to fiction Hollywood movies, but is more relevant here to documentaries, and more specifically to ethnographic films.This chapter is divided into three main sections. Firstly, it offers a brief overview of how the technology of sound recording is connected to the emergence of new cinematographic (sub) genres within the discipline of anthropology. Notably, the development of synchronous sound recording in the 1960’s contributed to the birth of direct cinema and cinéma vérité.This implies that new techniques of sound recording offer on the one hand, novel ways of creating cinematographic narratives and aesthetic territories, and on the other hand, contribute to larger debates of representation in anthropology and cognate fields. Secondly, I argue that sounds recorded “on location” are necessary to create rich and complex soundscapes that contribute to the fabrication of ethnographic ways of knowing. However, more than reproducing a naturalistic soundtrack of the spaces in which the film is produced, I suggest that an audio-visual ethnography in sound, following the concept of acoustemology as developed by Steven Feld (1996, 2015a), in combination with sound editing and manipulation techniques encourage anthropologists/filmmakers to explore the full potential of the sonic world—including music—as rich and essential sources of creative engagement and multisensorial cinematographic experiences. Thirdly, Guardians of the Night (2018), a film co-directed by Eleonora Diamanti and I, entirely shot at night time in Guantánamo, Cuba, will serve as a case 154

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study to delve into the creative potential of sound recording and editing as processes liable to stimulate new conversations about ethnographic research and filmmaking. Based on an original soundtrack composed by the Cuban electronic musician Lázaro Antonio Sevila Elías Calles, alias Zevil Strix, this atmospheric film offers more than a depiction of the urban night in Eastern Cuba; the soundtrack leads the way to generate a poetic and multisensorial engagement of the flows and rhythms of a city’s nocturnal symphony.

Sound, technology, and ethnographic films The history of ethnographic film is interwoven with that of the discipline of anthropology on the one hand and technological development on the other. Most notably, the invention of the shoulder camera and synchronized sound in the 1960’s—which allows for sound to be recorded simultaneously with the image—enabled greater flexibility of movement and filmic possibilities. It might be hard to imagine today, but camera separate from a sound recorder meant that the production team had to carry two heavy loads of equipment (e.g., recording devices, batteries, etc.). Filmmakers were also limited by the rolls of 16 mm film they had available to them, and the synchronization of the images with their corresponding sound in the editing suite—which was far from being an easy and convenient process.These technological limitations influenced the ways in which documentaries were conceived and produced. Before the advent of synchronized sound recording technology, a commentary track supported by music and sound effects used to tell the story of a documentary (Loizos, 1993). With the emergence of synch sound it became more common to hear participants dialoguing or responding directly to the camera, or engaging in action in front of the camera (e.g., Chronicle of a Summer by Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin, 1961) rather than having voiceover comments by a god-like narrator (for example The Hunters by John Marshall and Robert Gardner, 1957). Dialogues were subtitled rather than translated with voice over.This allowed the viewer to better appreciate the expressions, language, accents, and other characteristics shared through voice. Of course, stylistic differences remained. In his ethnographic films, Jean Rouch performed all of the voice over himself, even if his accent in English was difficult to understand (Tidjani Alou, 2018). His vocal presence, defined as “scholarly and secured,” paradoxically highlighted the silence of the African voice according to post-colonial scholars such as Antoinette Tidjani Alou (2018, p. 104). Other anthropologists, such as David MacDougall in the Doon School Chronicles (2000) and Robert Gardner in Forest of Bliss (1986), both produced in India, went as far as not providing English translation whatsoever, encouraging the viewer who does not possess the appropriate linguistic knowledge to delve into sensorial, reflexive, and even imaginative dimensions, instead of focusing on the linguistic content shared by spoken language. In the 1980’s, the anthropologists James Clifford and George Marcus (1986) launched a series of criticisms about the discipline of anthropology. The critiques targeted the ways in which anthropologists traditionally conducted fieldwork and wrote ethnographies. More specifically, their book emphasized the necessity to include a polyphony of voices in ethnographic writing, encouraged ethnographers to think in terms of fragmentation, incompleteness, non-linearity and partial truth, and raised the issue of reflexivity and the anthropologist’s own subjectivity at the time of conducting ethnographic fieldwork. This in turn, challenged the notion of objectivity associated with the ethnographic enterprise. Also, the book addressed the issues of representation—who can represent whom?—and the temporality of ethnographic accounts, which tended to position the Other as not living in the same timeframe as the researcher (see also Fabian, 1983), and the issue of a settled community of research. These marked a shift in 155

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the “anthropological imagination” where the world was no longer perceived as being complete and coherent, but rather fragmented and ambiguous (MacDougall, 2005, p. 244).Although one might acknowledge that until the 1990’s the discipline of anthropology had turned a deaf ear to the potential of moving images and sounds to broaden their avenues of research (Mead, 1995; also see Calzadilla and Marcus, 2006; Marcus, 2010), it could be argued that these epistemological shifts were already happening in visual anthropology. For instance, in the 1980’s visual anthropologists were already experimenting with sound and images to deconstruct a linear way of engaging with ethnographic material. Reassemblage (1982), a film directed by Trinh T. Minh-ha and shot in Senegal, provides a rich example of how sound in combination with images contributed to the debates of the “crisis of representation.” Throughout the film, an assemblage of sound clips (drumming, chanting, beats and rhythms, birds, etc.) and the voice of the director are superimposed on chopped images that do not necessarily work in synchrony.The soundtrack abruptly stops at times, voices and sounds are repeated, and then juxtaposed on seemingly unrelated images. At various occasions images blend with the voice of Trinh T. Minh-ha without any other sounds in the background, thus breaking with the flow of the film narrative.The director, who speaks with a calm voice, questions her own presence in the “field” as well as the nature of the work of the ethnologist.This forces the audience to step back and reflect on their own positionality and subjectivity as they watch the film and listen to what the director is sharing. Her voice often stands alone, surrounded by silence— something that provides a striking effect.At one point,Trinh T. Minh-ha says:“I do not intend to speak about, just speak nearby,” thus challenging the “ethnographic authority” and re-envisioning how anthropologists construct and impose their knowledge (Clifford, 1988). Reassemblage shows how sounds and images juxtaposed in a seemingly aleatory fashion and edited in a non-linear way generate a storyline that is somewhat bigger than what the audience experiences on the screen. The unique editing techniques adopted by Trinh T. Minh-ha and her post-production team create an aesthetic and film narrative that forces the audience to interrogate itself on how anthropological knowledge is produced, as well as on the ethical dimensions of conducting fieldwork. The increased access to digital recording devices (e.g., camera Hi-8 and mini-DV) in the 2000’s meant that more social researchers—including students—could produce films.As a result, the discipline witnessed an explosion of ethnographic film genres and subgenres, as well as new avenues of exploring the audio-visual medium with the production of not only films and videos, but also installations and performances (see for instance the Ethnographic Terminalia exhibits that took place in parallel with the American Anthropological Association annual meetings until 2019, and that showcased audio-visual experiments produced by anthropologists).1 The more recent rise in popularity of the Digital Single Lens Reflex (DSLR) cameras in video production means that many visual researchers began to rely—once again—on an external sound recorder (due to the low quality of sound recording offered by the DSLR cameras) such as a Zoom H4n device during the production of their projects. Lighter than the pre-1960’s filmmaking equipment, visual researchers still face similar challenges to their predecessors, mainly in relation to the quality and reliability of sound recordings. Thankfully, synchronizing digital sound clips with images is not a problem anymore. Editing software such as Final Cut Pro and Adobe Premiere can automatically synchronize sounds and images recorded by separate devices.

The creative potential of sound recording and editing in filmmaking It is not an overstatement to argue that in ethnographic films, sound is generally believed to be secondary to moving images. This can be observed, among other instances, when teaching ethnographic filmmaking to undergraduate students: sound equipment is often rudimentary, if 156

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existent, and the knowledge of sound recording technics transmitted remains basic and limited compared to visual tools. Most often, visual anthropologists purchase microphones only if their budget allows it. Sound, in sum, is the poor child of ethnographic filmmaking. Observational film—a genre of ethnographic film—is thought as particularly engaging with everyday experiences in the most non-obtrusive possible way. With its long takes and its focus on mundane processes and nonverbal “ways of knowing,” it is believed that observational films “render the soundscapes of the world in which the subjects live” (Carta, 2015, p. 11). Observational films should then depict a realistic representation of the world, and this includes its sounds.The Canadian composer and sound scholar, R. Murray Schafer defines the concept of soundscape as “any acoustic field of study,” any “events heard, not objects seen” (Schafer, 1994 [1977], p. 8; original emphasis). In comparison to a landscape that can be visually appreciated, soundscapes are heard, they represent the sounds that surround us, they are the compositions of the world made by humans, animals, the wind, machines, etc., and they could, by extension, represent the soundtrack or the sonic assemblages of a film. One of the characteristics of documentary film productions, in comparison to fiction movies shot in studios, is that sound is most often recorded “on location” rather than during postproduction. Most filmmakers know that location recording often “makes discrimination among sounds difficult, if not impossible” (Ruoff, 1992, p. 24). This means that various sources of soundscape elements can involuntarily become part of an ethnographic film soundtrack. This can be seen as a technical weakness, but it can also be approached as something that makes ethnographic films rich in conveying meanings that are not only framed in spoken language, but also transmitted through sonic textures (among other ways). Recording sounds on location welcomes spontaneous moments and contaminations, it also encounters glitches and noise, as well as the (in)voluntary presence of the filmmaker. It could be argued that the layers of sounds recorded on location are more in tune with the soundscape that characterizes the typical sense of a place with which a researcher engages. Having said this, it might be idealistic to think that one can gather the soundscape of a field site in a realistic and objective way: the position of microphones, the presence of the researcher and the production team, among other things, do have an obvious impact on the nature of a recording. As Emily Yu (2003, p. 96) points out, “using location sound is no closer to the truth than using manufactured sound. Manufacturing the sounds can bring us even closer to the truth than location sounds because the ability to create sounds allows a closer imitation of what we expect to hear.” The perspective raised by Emily Yu (2003) might be considered as “common knowledge” in the general domain of cinematographic studies.Yet, the concepts of montage, manipulation, and imitation may generate some discomfort in the field of ethnographic filmmaking. That is because still today, the “frank admission of the manipulation of the sound-track sits rather uncomfortably with the empirical rhetoric not just of observational cinema but with most contemporary modes of ethnographic documentary-making” (Henley, 2007, p. 57). Sound editing (and to a certain extent, this applies to the visual as well) and music added in the editing suite are often perceived with a suspicious eye (Henley, 2007).To this effect, Jean Rouch (1995) went as far as to describe music added to images in the editing suite as the “opium of cinema,” arguing that music could put someone to sleep or give artificial rhythms to images that did not have some. In his book The Adventure of the Real: Jean Rouch and the Craft of Ethnographic Cinema, Paul Henley (2009) explains that Jean Rouch used to record his own sounds on location during the production of his ethnographic films in order to add additional effects to the sound track at a later stage in the editing suite. Most often, he used those sounds for a naturalistic purpose, “to 157

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“sweeten,” […], enrich or touch up the sound track” (Henley, 2009, p. 298). But at other times, Jean Rouch used additional sounds to create a metaphorical effect, like in his ethno-fiction film Jaguar (1967). Generally speaking,“Rouch was highly circumspect about using nonsynchronous music in his ethnographic documentaries,” an approach to sound editing he did not adopt for his fiction movies (Henley, 2009, p. 298). In other words, we could argue that Rouch had the intention to stay closer to the “real” with his documentary films, in comparison with his movies of fiction, despite the fact that he recognized that the line between documentary and fiction is actually quite thin (in Stoller, 1994, pp. 96–97). Jean Rouch referred to the sound effects that were intentionally added to a soundtrack and that persuaded the audience about something of a soundscape that was not “real”, as “trompe-l’oreille” (literally translated as “ear-fooling”) (Henley, 2009, p. 298). Without denying that sound manipulation might not best fit with the aesthetic of observational ethnographic film, Paul Henley (2007) recognizes that there is one way in which the design of a soundtrack could contribute to thickening the ethnographic description of a film (to borrow Clifford Geertz’s (1973) concept of thick ethnography) and it is in the filmic representation of space and place. Carefully recorded environmental sounds and a designed soundtrack in the editing suite can contribute to better communicate a sense of place and, according to Paul Henley (2007, p. 56), they can do so in three main ways: by thickening the ethnographic description; by enhancing the spectator’s understanding; and by proposing new interpretations of the subject matter of a film.Visual researchers are then encouraged to record sounds with an external device at various locations during the production of a film.The clips accumulated and preserved serve as resources to build supplementary layers of sounds, and consequently thicken the meaning of the soundtrack.This would somewhat correspond to the naturalistic approach adopted by Rouch and mentioned above, although not necessarily. For instance, Leviathan (2012) directed by Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel about the North American fishing industry illustrates the idea of thickness provided by an original soundtrack, somewhat cacophonous (Westmoreland and Luvaas, 2015), and composed of multiple layers of sounds. Pavsek (2015, p. 7) argues that it is through sound montage that “the film perhaps most effectively ‘touches’ the spectator” and that the soundtrack serves “to fill out the apparent immediacy of the embodied moment.” Indeed, the proposition to build a thicker and more meaningful soundtrack is an invitation that should be considered and explored by anthropologists/filmmakers. Yet, I suggest that in addition to collecting sounds to potentially thicken the soundtrack of a film, anthropologists/ filmmakers should explore the potential of the sonic world in more novel and creative ways in order to enhance the audience experience and to provide new forms of engagement with the practices of listening, design, editing, manipulation, and even collaboration. Additionally, nontraditional approaches to sound in ethnographic filmmaking can stimulate the current interest on multisensoriality, which emphasizes the full potential of recording (sound and visual) in stimulating our bodily engagement with our changing world.

The sounds of the night The film Guardians of the Night (2018), co-directed by Eleonora Diamanti and I, is entirely shot at night time in the city of Guantánamo, located in Eastern Cuba.2 Guardians of the Night aims at delving into the textures of the night from a sensorial perspective, and more specifically by adopting a creative approach to the use of sounds. To do so, we worked in collaboration with the Guantánamo-based sound artist and electronic music composer Zevil Strix in the crafting of an original soundtrack based on sounds recorded on location, but not exclusively. Sounds 158

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recorded were distorted, manipulated, and transformed. Added in the editing suite, non-diegetic sounds—mainly piano and electronic music effects—accompany images not necessarily in sync. Our collaborative approach with a sound artist stimulated a sensorial, instinctive, and even passionate experience of the night.We became anthropologists who flirted with an artistic approach within the context of an ethnographic audio-visual project (see also Schneider and Wright, 2006, 2010, 2013).The process of producing the film became our ethnographic fieldwork, as we fully embraced the notion that research is a creative process (see Sullivan, 2010).Thus, we became creative agents and producers/researchers, in addition to participant observers (Boudreault-Fournier, 2012; Boudreault-Fournier and Wees, 2017).The synopsis of the film goes as follows: Guardians of the Night is an experimental and sensorial short-length ethnographic film about the cyclical and spontaneous life activities that emerge at nighttime in Guantánamo, Cuba. […] The senses are at the center of the night experience along with reduction of visibility.This creates a perfect focus to reinvigorate discussion and promote an innovative approach around sensory visual ethnography, in a time when audio-visual methods generally remain marginal within social sciences, and the idea of multisensorial anthropological film is often criticized for not being able to fully capture the sensorial world.3 During the process of the film production, we recorded sounds with a Zoom H4n to capture the subtleties of the sonic layers constituting the soundscape of the night in Guantánamo. A cinematographic approach that is attentive to sounds “strongly implicate[s] relationships of sound, place, and space” (Samuels et al., 2010, p. 333) and in our case, it aimed at digging into the nocturnal ambience of a city in Eastern Cuba.The film is a tryptic; it is built around a two-bytwo interaction of six characters who do not know each other and who will not meet.We did not use any dialogue nor any voice over. A few recorded words, such as “café” and “Santiago,” were manipulated—repeated and distorted with an echo effect—and incorporated into the soundtrack during the bus station scene. More than capturing the sounds “at a distance” as if we were detached from the “landscape” where we produced the film, we conducted our audio-visual ethnography in sound, following the work of Steven Feld (1996). In sound implies that we bear an attentive listening practice to the sounds that surrounded us in relation with the space, the people, and the events we encountered. It is with this approach in mind that we built the narrative of Guardians of the Night, which became a film that is primarily sonic. Our approach to sound during the production phase of the film was aligned with the concept of acoustemology as proposed by Steven Feld (1996), and even if this term was not primarily developed with a cinematographic intention in mind, it does highlight a dynamic and creative way of thinking about how sounds can potentially open the way for novel practices in ethnographic filmmaking. During a conversation with Donald Brenneis, the ethnomusicologist, linguist, and anthropologist Steven Feld (Feld and Brenneis, 2004) remembers the first paper he wrote while he was studying under the supervision of Alan P. Merriam at Indiana University. His paper was a response to the book The Anthropology of Music (1964), written by Merriam himself. Feld explains that two questions were at the basis of the argument developed in his essay at the time, two questions that still guide his anthropological approach today.The two questions are what about an anthropology of sound? and what about ethnographies that are tape recordings? (Ibid., p. 463). It is this shift of perspective toward listening and recording that led Steven Feld to delve into the “anthropology of sound,” and what he later called an “anthropology in sound” (Feld, 1996). 159

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During his fieldwork in Papua New Guinea in the 1970’s, Feld (1990 [1982]) described the songs performed by the Kaluli people of Bosavi as adaptations of the tropical forest in which they live. But it was much more than that. By training his ears to the ways in which people produce and perceive sounds, Feld realized that the songs performed by the Kaluli people were vocal cartographies of the rain forest, that they were sung from the point of view of the birds that represented the dead ancestors. His reflections, fueled by recordings (Feld, 1991), generated a relational approach to the sound domain that responded to Schafer’s fundamental shortcomings (Feld, 1994, 1996). In the same conversation with Donald Brenneis, Steven Feld explained that “an ethnography should include what it is that people hear every day” (Feld and Brenneis, 2004, p. 462), something he came to refer to as “acoustemology” (Feld, 1996): a fusion between acoustics and epistemology which refers to the primacy of sound and listening as modality of knowledge and being in the world. Based on a relational ontology, the concept of acoustemology connotes the idea that we learn not through an acquired form of knowledge, but through a cumulative and interactive process based on participatory and interactive experiences (Sterne, 2012, pp. 13–14). Feld was inspired by the concept of soundscape, but he also dissociated himself from it. In comparison with “soundscape” as developed by R. Murray Schafer, who refers to sound as an indicator of how humans live in their environment, acoustemology is relational, situated, fluid, reflexive, and contextual; it is the study of sound as a way of knowing. Acoustemology thus contrasts with the impression of rigidity, distance, and division of the senses associated with “soundscape.” In Voices of the Rainforest (1991), which condenses 24 hours in the life of the Bosavi people into a one-hour long album, Steven Feld created a form of hybrid recording in combining three sound genres: radio sound documentary, world music, and soundscape composition (Feld and Brenneis, 2004, p. 467). Feld also worked with artist Virginia Ryan on a multimedia installation called the Castaways project inspired by the West Africa coastline (Ryan and Feld, 2007).The project redefines the boundaries between art and anthropology; it proposes a multisensorial way of engaging with memories and the legacy of slavery.4 Another collaboration, between Feld and a Ghanaian multi-instrumentalist Nii Otoo Annan, gave birth to an experimental CD called project Bufo Variations (Annan and Feld, 2008; Feld, 2015b). His methodological approach consisted of a mix of playback techniques (which he borrowed from Jean Rouch), dialogic editing (Feld, 1987), and conversations with Annan about “his listening practices, his sonic knowing, his acoustemological way of hearing” (Feld, 2015b, p. 94). In attempting to acquire a fine tuning of how hearing is embedded into forms of learning and practicing, the relational nature of listening emerges and connects with the principle of acoustemology. In the case of Guardians of the Night, the process of blending on location recordings with ambient music into one soundtrack composition emerged spontaneously for Zevil Strix who already experimented with such forms of composition in his own artistic practice.There exists a rich literature on the role of music in the experience of fiction movies (for instance, Chion, 1994; Donnelly, 2001; Kassabian, 2000), but it is rare to encounter references on the potential of mixing various sources of sounds (ambient, musical, electronic, etc.) to compose a documentary or ethnographic film sound track, as we did with Guardians of the Night. Our experimental approach was based on an attentive form of listening, following the concept of acoustemology developed by Feld, throughout the production and post-production phases of the film. The soundtrack interlaced with images captured at night time gives a strong artistic signature to the film. Emotions and multisensorial stimulations surface as the audience travels into the dark but poetic, intense and rhythmic nocturnal life of Guantánamo. 160

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Conclusion Even if we often tend to forget it, sounds matter in ethnographic filmmaking, and that is because sounds are part of the cinematographic experience.They contribute to create emotions, they take part in the construction of a sense of place, space, and time. In combination with moving images, they provoke a multitude of impressions, they may destabilize or, on the contrary, recomfort the audience, and they may disrupt a linear narrative or flow. Sounds in cinema are also about voices and silences, dialogues and interactions—or they might highlight what is missing.These are only a few examples of the potential of sound world in cinema. Despite the reluctance of the discipline of anthropology to engage with questions of montage and manipulation, this chapter has argued that a more creative use of sounds—more creative than just using them for naturalistic purposes—can potentially generate new conversations on the nature of the ethnographic fieldwork itself, in addition to proposing novel filmic aesthetics. Guardians of the Night, briefly discussed in this chapter, is one example of a film based on an attentive form of listening practice and the careful crafting of an original soundtrack based on in situ recordings as well as non-diegetic sounds and electronic music effects. It is the night—a dark and often silenced period in a 24-hours day—that encouraged us to explore at its full capacity the senses—other than vision—that are in ebullition. Sonic textures lead the film’s narrative, but not independently from the images.The soundtrack, in concordance with the images, elevates the cinematographic experience in proposing a highly poetic, creative, and ethnographic relational encounter with the night.

Notes 1 2 3 4

The Ethnographic Terminalia website is at http://ethnographicterminalia.org. The trailer of the film is available at: https://vimeo.com/275514067. The full synopsis is available at https://guardiansnight.wordpress.com. See the website of the artist Virginia Ryan: http://www.virginiaryanart.ifp3.com/page/the-castawaysproject-2003-2007/#/page/the-castaways-project-2003-2007/.

References Annan, N. O., & Feld, S. (2008). Bufo variations [CD].VoxLox. Boudreault-Fournier, A. (2012). Écho d’une rencontre virtuelle:Vers une ethnographie de la production audio-visuelle. Anthropologica, 54(1), 1–12. Boudreault-Fournier, A., & Wees, N. (2017). Creative engagement with interstitial urban spaces:The case of the Vancouver’s Back Alleys. In M. Radice & A. Boudreault-Fournier (Eds.), Urban encounters:Art and the public (pp. 192–211). Montreal, QC: McGill University Press. Boudreault-Fournier, A., & Diamanti, E. (2018). Guardians of the Night [Film]. Victoria: Sonoptica Film Production. Calzadilla, F., & Marcus, G. (2006).Artists in the field: Between art and anthropology. In A. Schneider & C. Wright (Eds.) Contemporary Art and Anthropology (pp. 95–116). Oxford: Berg. Carta, S. (2015).Visual and experiential knowledge in observational cinema. Anthrovision, 3(1), 1–16. Castaing-Taylor, L., & Paravel,V. (2012). Leviathan [Film]. New York: Cinema Guild. Chion, M. (1994). Audio-vision: Sound on screen. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Clifford, J. (1988). The predicament of culture:Twentieth-century ethnography, literature, and art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Clifford, J. and. G. E. Marcus (Eds.) (1986). Writing Culture:The poetics and politics of ethnography, Berkeley: University of California Press. Donnelly, K. (2001). Film music: Critical approaches. London: Continuum. Fabian, J. (1983). Time and the other: How anthropology makes its object. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

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Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier Feld, S. (1987). Dialogic editing: Interpreting how Kaluli read sound and sentiment. Cultural Anthropology, 2(2), 190–210. Feld, S. (1990/1982). Sound and sentiment: Birds, weeping, poetics, and song in Kaluli expression. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Feld, S. (1991). Voices of the rainforest:A day in the life of the Kaluli people [CD 10173]. Salem: Rykodisc. Feld, S. (1994). From schizophonia to schizmogenesis: On the discourses and commodification practices of “World Music” and “World Beat”. In C. Keil & S. Feld (Eds.), Music grooves (pp. 257–289). Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Feld, S. (1996).Waterfalls of song:An acoustemology of place resounding in Bosavi, Papua New Guinea. In S. Feld & K. H. Basso (Eds.), Senses of place (pp. 91–135). Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press. Feld, S. (2015a). Acoustemology. In D. Novak & M. Sakakeeny (Eds.), Keywords in sounds (pp. 12–21). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Feld, S. (2015b). Listening to histories of listening: Collaborative experiments in acoustemology with Nii Otoo Annan. In G. Borio (Ed.), Musical listening in the age of technological reproduction (pp. 91–103). London: Routledge. Feld, S., & Brenneis, D. (2004). Doing anthropology in sound. American Ethnologist, 31(4), 461–474. Gardner, R. (1986). Forest of bliss [Film]. Watertown: Documentary Educational Resources.22. Geertz, C. (1973). Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture. In C. Clifford (Ed.), The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (pp. 3-30). New York: Basic Books. Henley, P. (2007). Seeing, hearing, feeling: Sound and the despotism of the eye in “visual” anthropology. Visual Anthropology Review, 23(1), 54–63. Henley, P. (2009). The adventure of the real: Jean Rouch and the craft of ethnographic cinema. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Kassabian A. (2000). Hearing film: Tracking identifications in contemporary hollywood film music. London: Routledge. Loizos, P. (1993). Innovation in ethnographic film: From innocence to self-consciousness, 1955–85. Chicago, IL:The University of Chicago Press. MacDougall, D. (2000). Doon school chronicles [Film]. Berkeley: Berkeley Media LLC. MacDougall, D. (2005). The corporeal image [Film], Ethnography, and the senses. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Marcus, G. E. (2010). Contemporary aesthetics in art and anthropology: Experiments in collaboration and intervention. Visual Anthropology, 23(4), 263–277. Marshall, J., & Gardner, R. (1957). The hunters [Film]. Documentary Educational Resources. Mead, M. (1995). Visual anthropology in a discipline of words. In P. Hockings (Ed.), Principles of visual anthropology (pp. 3–10). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Merriam,A. P. (1964). The anthropology of music. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Minh-ha, T. T. (1982). Reassemblage [Film]. New York:Women Make Movies. Pavsek, C. (2015). Leviathan and the experience of sensory ethnography. Visual Anthropology Review, 31(1), 4–11. Rouch, J., & Morin, E. (1961). Paris: Chronicle of a summer [Film].Argos Films. Rouch, J. (1967). Jaguar [Film]. New York: Icarus Films. Rouch, J. (1995). The camera and man. In P. Hockings (Ed.), Principles of visual anthropology (pp. 79–98). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Ruoff, J. (1992). Conventions of sound documentary. In R. Altman (Ed.), Sound theory/sound practice (pp. 217–234). New York, NY: Routledge. Ryan,V., & Feld, S. (2007). The castaways project [CD, DVD]. Santa Fe, NM:VoxLox. Samuels, D.W., Meintjes, L., Ochoa,A. M., & Porcello,T. (2010). Soundscapes:Toward a sounded anthropology. Annual Review of Anthropology, 39, 329–345. Schafer, R. M. (1994/1977). The soundscape: Our sonic environment and the tuning of the world. Rochester, NW: Destiny Books. Schneider, A., & Wright, C. (2006). The challenge of practice. In A. Schneider & C. Wright (Eds.), Contemporary art and anthropology (pp. 1–28). New York, NY: Berg. Schneider, A., & Wright, C. (2010). Between art and anthropology. In A. Schneider and C.Wright (Eds.), Between art and anthropology: Contemporary ethnographic practice (pp. 1–21). New York, NY: Berg. Schneider,A., & Wright, C. (2013).Ways of knowing. In A. Schneider & C.Wright (Eds.), Anthropology and art practice (pp. 1–23). New York, NY: Bloomsbury.

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Sound matters Sterne, J. (2012). Sonic imaginations. In J. Sterne (Ed.),The sound studies reader (pp. 1–17). London: Routledge. Stoller, P. (1994).Artaud, Rouch and the cinema of cruelty. In L.Taylor (Ed.), Visualizing theory (pp. 84–98). New York, NY: Routledge. Sullivan, G. (2010). Art practice as research: Inquiry in visual arts. London: Sage Publications. Tidjani,A.A. (2018). Jean Rouch et ses Maîtres fous: Quelques considérations à partir de Niamey, au Niger. In R. Sherman (Ed.), Dans le sillage de Jean Rouch: Témoignages et essais (pp. 93–100). Paris: Éditions Fondation maison des sciences de l’homme. Westmoreland, M. R., & Luvaas, B. (2015). Introduction: Leviathan and the entangled lives of species. Visual Anthropology Review, 31(1), 1–3. Yu, E. (2003). Perspectives: Sounds of cinema:What do we really hear? Journal of Popular Film and Television, 31(2), 93–96.

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15 DOCUMENTARY HYBRIDS Lorenzo Ferrarini

The label of documentary hybrids refers to an emergent current within documentary filmmaking that mixes fictional and non-fictional footage without clearly identifying or labelling either. These films purposefully leave their audience in a state of uncertainty over the factual status of what they are watching. They develop around ambiguity by using media art, performance, enactment, and sometimes even deception. Documentary hybrids defy classifications into genres and categories, push boundaries, and force “each genre to explain itself, to forgo any transparent relationship to the reality it represents, and to make evident the knowledge claims on which it is based” (Marks, 2000, p. 8).The term “hybrid” is taken from postcolonial contributions on cultural hybridity, where the impossibility of identifying a dominant component reveals the artificiality of static and essentialist identities (Bhabha, 1994;Werbner & Modood, 1997). By not explicitly framing themselves as fictional or factual, documentary hybrids are distinct from ethnofiction, a more established genre of ethnographic film (Sjöberg, 2008).They are also distinct from the use of dramatized re-enactments, which has become popular in non-fiction film since at least The Thin Blue Line (Morris, 1988), because they do not necessarily adopt a different style to mark the fictional footage.At the same time, they are different from mockumentaries, which leave visible their parodic character (Roscoe & Hight, 2001). In this chapter I trace the precursors of documentary hybrids, discuss examples in the grey area between fiction and non-fiction and through my own practice highlight the relevance of hybridity for ethnographic filmmaking.

Ancestors Even though documentary hybrids have only been consolidating as practice during the last two decades, their origins are as old as documentary itself. In fact, one of the first works examined in ethnographic filmmaking textbooks, Nanook of the North (Flaherty, 1922), makes use of dramatized and enacted sequences in reconstructing the ways of life of an Inuit hunter and his family. While Nanook’s enacted scenes were in part originated by the practical limitations of the technology of the time, we know that Flaherty was also interested in creating dramatic tension and in stimulating interest in the viewers (Ruby, 2000), and not so much concerned with highlighting the status of his images.At the time, documentary films were neither an established form nor practice, and in fact the term “documentary” was not used in the sense we commonly adopt today. John Grierson is commonly credited with coining the expression “documentary” 164

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to refer to a film in his review of Moana (Flaherty, 1926), a work today we would more likely classify as docufiction.While in this review the term “documentary” is used as adjective in the expression “documentary value,” in the 1930s Grierson famously wrote about documentary as “the creative treatment of actuality” (1933, p. 8). In so doing he meant to distinguish these films from travelogues, newsreels and lecture films, which he considered lower forms lacking narrative and organization (Ward, 2005, p. 9). In other words, during the early days of documentary the integration of unacknowledged fictional elements was not considered problematic, if anything it was an essential quality of documentary proper.The years around 1930 also saw some of the most daring experiments in non-fiction film, with surrealist ethnographies involving unreliable voice-of-god narration (Buñuel, 1932), or daring editing techniques mixing observed and enacted scenes (Vertov, 1929). Rouch acknowledged Flaherty’s influence on his collaborative filmmaking practice in a number of interviews. Rouch added a layer of reflexivity, though, which is absent in Flaherty’s films. In Chronicle of a Summer (Rouch & Morin, 1960) not only do we see the filmmakers discuss with and provoke their subjects, but witness them questioning the “documentary value” of the film in the final two scenes: a closed-doors preview of the film for its protagonists and a final reflection by the two filmmakers Morin and Rouch as they walk up and down the Musée de l’Homme. Morin himself, in distancing himself from Dziga Vertov’s approach to kino-pravda, mentions Flaherty as the spiritual father of his newly coined cinéma-verité (Morin, 2003, p. 231). With this formula he and Rouch referred to a specific kind of truth that exists in front of the camera and emerges from the editing suite. Both Rouch and Morin agreed that the film should be based on this performative truth and run it as a research experiment in which they would push and provoke their subjects to reveal layers of their personality that were normally hidden (Henley, 2009, pp. 151–152). The result are sequences in which even the protagonists are brought to reconsider dichotomies such as fictional-nonfictional, or authentic-performed. Even though it does not do away with the layer of reflexivity that frames the film as a form of social research, Chronicle of a Summer can be considered the first experiment in documentary hybrids within the social sciences for its explicit questioning of the real, the central role of performance, and its ambiguous epistemology. Rouch’s ethnofictions, some of which predate Chronicle, on the other hand invariably contain short introductions that frame what follows as fiction based on lived biographies and real people’s imaginations.

Shifting modes of representation The perception of a filmic sequence as fictional or non-fictional is a complex process, which involves factors that are sometimes entirely external to the film itself, such the context of screening. An anthropology department or a documentary film festival create expectations in the audience that are very different from a contemporary art museum or an avant-garde film festival (Eitzen, 1995). Film directors have used for a long time a variety of techniques to influence their viewers’ judgement on the status of the images they see, for example adopting handheld 16mm camerawork and avoiding nondiegetic sound within fiction films to reference the style of direct cinema films from the 1960s, or more recently digital video (Landesman, 2008). In the light of polemics around fake documentaries such as No Lies (Block, 1973) or Ford Transit (Abu-Assad, 2002), in which nothing in the film suggests the fictional status of the images, it is interesting for this discussion of documentary hybrids to examine films that contain shifts between fictional and non-fictional modes. In these cases, the switching is far from straightforward and brings viewers to reconsider their interpretation of what they have seen so far and of the film as a whole. 165

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In Stories We Tell (2012), filmmaker and actress Sarah Polley weaves what could at first sight seem like a fairly conventional personal documentary centered on her discovery that her late mother conceived her as a result of a brief extramarital affair.When she broke the news to her father, his reaction was that of starting to write a lengthy account of his marriage. Around the same time, her biological father too began the process of piecing together his point of view with the intent of publishing it. Polley then started the documentary in response to the circulation of various versions of the story as told by different categories of people ranging from those directly involved to peripheral acquaintances.The film uses conventional devices such as formal talking head interviews, voiceover narration, and archival footage.The shift I mentioned happens one hour and twenty minutes into the film, when a series of images makes it clear that much of what we had seen up until then as 8mm archival footage of informal moments between her mother and her lover are in fact re-enactments directed by Polley, in which actors take the place of her biological parents. Within the film’s narrative this moment of revelation also marks a shift in the focus of the documentary, when the centrality of the theme of storytelling becomes more apparent. Polley’s voiceover confronts the impossibility of reconstructing an objective account of the events as the main surviving protagonists in their interviews each claim their privileged role of narrators, often in conflicting ways.The revelation that what we could have considered archival documentary footage is in fact fictional is not merely a way to surprise the viewer but represents a strategy that puts the format of the film in accord with its theme. Just like the puzzled filmmaker trying to understand who her mother really was and struggling to reconstruct the events, the audience is left wondering how much of what they hear is to be trusted, who is lying and who is omitting, and whether after all personal stories can and should ever be reliable accounts. Shifts in modes of representation are often reflexive and metafilmic, of a different order compared to the content of the rest of the film because they are about the status of that content. Although metacinema as a mode of filmmaking is frequent in movies ranging from Vertov and Fellini to contemporary Hollywood blockbusters, here I am interested in metafilmic shifts between documentary and fictional modes. A remarkable tendency to perform filmic experiments with metacinema mixing these two modes can be retraced in post-revolutionary Iranian cinema, in which metacinematic experimentation is often subtly linked to political messages and ways of overcoming censorship (Landesman, 2006). One of the best-known examples is Kiarostami’s Close-Up (1990), in which a man accused of impersonating director Mohsen Makhmalbaf plays himself re-enacting his imposture in parallel with footage of his trial. However, the most relevant to my point is perhaps Jafar Panahi’s The Mirror (1997). In its symmetrical structure a first part sets out as other neorealist Iranian stories of children dealing with everyday challenges. Mina, the protagonist, finds out that her mother, who was supposed to pick her up from school, has not showed up, and decides to try and get home on her own facing a considerable trip through Teheran. Along the way she meets a variety of characters, some more or less helpful, until she seems to manage to get on the right bus. Here, apparently angered by the tone of a fellow actor in a previous scene, she stares into the camera, gets audibly reprimanded by the director and finally announces that she is not acting anymore. Here the film switches to handheld 16mm camera, from the tripod-mounted 35mm it had adopted so far, signaling a passage to documentary mode as we get out of the main storyline.The director and crew try to convince Mina to keep shooting, but she packs her things and leaves. Realizing that she still has the radiomicrophone transmitter on her, Panahi directs the cinematographer to keep shooting her.We switch back to 35mm shot from the moving bus, closing a roughly ten minute-long scene that occupies almost exactly the center of the film. The rest of The Mirror follows Mina as she tries to find her way home, duplicating the format of the first part, including 166

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a meeting with a puzzled old lady who had appeared earlier as a character and now struggles to understand what is really going on. Of course, the switch to documentary mode is only apparent, because it is contained inside a fiction drama film, but is meant to mislead the viewers and make them look at the final portion of the film with new eyes.This time she is “really” lost, or is she? The mirror is that where the film looks at itself, as the boundaries between reality and fiction get blurred. If Panahi’s strategy in The Mirror borders deception, Orson Welles makes no mystery of misleading the viewers in F for Fake (1974). Since its prologue the filmmaker introduces himself as an illusionist in a film about trickery, fraud and lies. Still, he promises to stick to “what’s really true” and “solid facts” for the following hour. As this flamboyant essay film explores art forgery and the roles of experts and art critics in validating the authenticity of a piece of art, we are presented with conflicting accounts by unreliable protagonists (a forger and an author of fake biographies) expertly woven together through acrobatic editing. One hour and seventeen minutes after the “promise”Welles reveals that the last portion of the film was entirely fictional. As in Stories We Tell, in F for Fake the shifts between factual and fictional modes serve the purpose of reinforcing the approach to the content, putting in the spotlight the suspension of disbelief that documentaries and artworks alike require of their audiences. Many documentary hybrids make use of similar strategies of shifting modes of representation to highlight how the status of actuality of certain filmic material is often based on conventions, on the filmic context, or on the intentions of the maker.

From performance to enactive filmmaking An important practitioner of hybrid filmmaking is Werner Herzog, who famously refuses to acknowledge essential differences between his documentary work and the rest of his production (Herzog, 2002a, p. 95 and 240). In works such as Bells from the Deep (1993), Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1998a), or Wings of Hope (1998b), Herzog is known to have used fictional devices to heighten the intensity of the stories he portrayed. Talking about Little Dieter, for example, Herzog remarks how the protagonist “had to become an actor playing himself. Everything in the film is authentic Dieter, but to intensify him it is all re-orchestrated, scripted and rehearsed” (2002a, p. 265).These “intensifications” are sometimes constituted by selecting ad hoc settings— an aircraft cemetery, a tank of jellyfish—adding extradiegetic music, or through performances emerging from rehearsal and discussion with the subject, such as opening and closing doors, visiting a tattoo parlor, and marching in a forest with tied hands. In his well-known Minnesota Declaration, Herzog describes “fabrication and imagination and stylization” as the only way to reach “deeper strata of truth in cinema,” a “poetic, ecstatic truth” (2002b, p. 301). Calling these devices “fictional” does not respect Herzog’s approach, which aims at transcending such labels as fact and fiction. Herzog’s “fabrications” are always directed at connecting individual stories to more universal truths, going beyond their factual circumscription. His films are a good example of the key role that performances play within the documentary hybrid strand. The fascination that performances exert on hybrid filmmakers stems from similar observations to those that led social scientists to underline the theatrical aspects framing everyday presentations of the self (Goffman, 1956), or to remark how social performances provide reflexive interpretations of shared symbols, including their critique and subversion (Turner, 1969). In few films is this metadiscursive role of performances more evident than in Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing (2012). In it, the filmmaker pushes a perpetrator of the 1965–66 killings that followed a US-backed military coup in Indonesia and some of his 167

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friends to re-create tortures, murders, and self-absolutory afterworlds for a film project. These re-enactments are unlike those employed by most non-fiction works, in that they see the perpetrators playing themselves in the style of the gangster movies that inspired them. In the sometimes highly-stylized sequences of torture or strangling, the explicit fakeness of the situation and the knowledge that the protagonists actually performed those acts on scores of innocents, clash with disquieting effects.These re-enactments are not simply suggestive placeholders for events that took place long before and were not filmed, they are at the same time part of a strategy by the filmmaker to make visible the paradoxes of living with genocide, and by the perpetrators to come to terms with what they have done.The parallels between the “enacted” reality conjured by the perpetrators and the official narrative on their actions in contemporary Indonesia provide plenty of surreal and paradoxical moments throughout the film, to the point that the viewer starts to question the meaning of "reality" in a country where the executors of a genocide are celebrated as heroes by the state and the media.The same suspension of disbelief that is at work in the cinema, Oppenheimer seems to suggest, is what allows a nation to live with genocide, clinging to a narrative of heroism and aggression motivated by defense. Oppenheimer, who takes similar positions to Herzog in opposing direct cinema and declaring himself in pursuit of a truth that is beyond documentary standards (in Behlil & Oppenheimer, 2013, p. 28), takes the role of catalyst in facilitating his subjects’ performances, and occasionally interacting with them from behind the camera. Even though the re-enactments were originally proposed by the perpetrators, The Act of Killing would be a very different film and not nearly as powerful and insightful had the filmmaker not taken the role of pushing the performances of its protagonists. In documentary hybrids, then, performances often have an interactive quality that sees subjects collaborate with authors. This aspect takes us beyond the simple idea of the mixture of fact and fiction because it approaches reality not as a given but as the outcome of a negotiation between parts: “whenever we film anybody, we create reality with that person” (Oppenheimer in Behlil & Oppenheimer, 2013, p. 28). I approach my own filmwork in a similar way, which I have called enactive filmmaking (Ferrarini, 2017). A Migrant’s Tale (Ferrarini, 2008) consists of an interview with an anonymous Egyptian migrant living in the outskirts of Milan, Italy. The film’s visuals, consisting almost entirely of still photographs that I had taken during the previous years, show everyday scenes from his and his friends’ and relatives’ lives in Italy—at the time almost all undocumented migrants from the same Nile Delta town. As the voiceover proceeds in telling a migratory experience in the first person, from the perilous crossing of the Mediterranean by boat to obtaining the much-desired residency permit, viewers are never sure as to whose images should be paired with the voice. Different men cook, work, go to the barber’s, make calls home, and finally pack up their things and go back to Egypt to get married. I collaboratively structured the script of the interview with my friend and collaborator Osama El-Sayed, to then prepare a sequence of photographs that followed that same trajectory. Osama improvised the narrative while looking at the photographs, as in a photo elicitation session.The resulting biography is partly fictional, as implied by the multiple faces paired with different phases of the narrator’s tale, and mixes Osama’s own experiences with those of his circle of friends and relatives. For example, Osama did not reach Italy by crossing the Mediterranean; he overstayed a business visa. Still, he chose to tell words he heard from his friends and that he reckoned to be most representative. After the main body of the film, constituted by the description of everyday activities such as work, rest and leisure, and mostly representative of Osama’s own life in Italy, come the other main fictional elements, namely the residency permit, the return to Egypt, and the wedding. Here Osama expressed the imagined and hoped conclusion of his migratory trajectory, again drawing inspiration from the events involving his relatives and friends. 168

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Unlike ethnofictions, which traditionally develop around the frame of fiction genres (road movies, soap operas, crime dramas), A Migrant’s Tale takes the form of a life-story interview, which in documentary films we often associate with such a degree of intimacy that the possibility of it being fictional borders betrayal.The film was produced in 2008, but the filmic present of the interview is set to 2012, so that Osama is narrating in the past tense even those events that at the time he had not yet been through.The presence of dates is not simply a manner to tell the fictional from the factual in Osama’s biography, because the two elements are mixed throughout his account. Rather, it can be seen as a way to put viewers on the wrong track, as it were, by leading them to think that only the extradiegetic future is not part of Osama’s lived experience.The film’s referential ambiguity, the impossibility to visually identify the speaker, was only in part motivated by the need to provide Osama with visual anonymity. Primarily, it was a reference to the practice of switching identities, whereby multiple undocumented migrants are able to work with a single set of IDs, which was common within the group with which I was working. More in general, the character of collaborative performance of this piece, whereby Osama spoke for himself and for others while being greatly influenced by the specific perspective of my photographic body of work, also references the narratives that migrants provide of their experiences abroad to their sending communities. Here many elements are often transformed, biographies overlap, hardships can be omitted, and trajectories are straightened. A Migrant’s Tale presents characteristics of hybridity that I later developed more fully in Kalanda—The Knowledge of the Bush (Ferrarini, 2015), particularly concerning the involvement of the filmmaker in collaboratively creating revelatory performances that defy the fact/fiction dichotomy. Kalanda tells the story of the first year of my apprenticeship among initiated donso hunters in Burkina Faso. Divided in chapters, the film progresses through the authoritative teachings of various master hunters, who introduce such diverse aspects of donsoya as skilled perception in the bush, herbal medicine, and amulet-making. A principal teacher, Adama Sogo Traoré, sends the apprentice to learn these different aspects one after the other and provides comments and further teachings as a connection between the chapters. This structure is the outcome of a collaborative process of filming and screening back, which allowed a manipulation of the timeline to give viewers the impression of a linear progression from topic to topic.Adama watched a rough edit of the chapters that make up the film and recorded his upper-level commentary at the end of the filming period.The narrative device of sending the apprentice to the next chapter in his education was entirely devised by me, and masterfully executed by Adama. Enacted sequences are also frequent within the film’s chapters—sometimes for practical reasons, as in many of the shots pertaining to hunting for which fabrications were necessary to evoke the subtle sensory aspects of pursuing wild animals. In other cases, it was necessary to safeguard the secrecy of the teachings by delivering agreed-upon statements that would not reveal too much. Elsewhere, certain scenes defy categorization, as the apprenticeship and the making of the film overlap, for example when I am taught how to prepare a plant-based talisman.The teacher for that section of the film and I selected that procedure as one suitable for filming, but as much as he was explicitly performing for the camera I was still acquiring new knowledge. It is not possible to label that sequence as an enactment in the traditional sense, because it was part of my apprenticeship, yet at the same time it was structured and delivered with the film in mind and would not have taken place without my presence with the camera. In enactive filmmaking the involvement of the filmmaker contributes to create a hybrid reality in which the filmic subjects perform themselves in collaboration with the director. In Kalanda this principle is taken to extremes, insofar as the whole film represents an enacted and condensed summary of twelve months of apprenticeship. In it, long-term processes of enskillment are condensed in a few minutes, teachers deliver versions of donso knowledge that 169

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are neatly ordered according to topic and suitable for an audience of non-initiates. Since the whole project developed around the inclusion of the filmmaker in the community of practice of the hunters, it made no sense to me to approach the film from a neutral, objectivist stance. Accordingly, in the film there are no markers setting apart fact from fiction or enacted from observed, in acknowledgment of the interactive and collaborative nature of the project.

Conclusion: hybrid truths Only a few of the films I mentioned in this text can be considered ethnographic films, but what is the value of importing their hybrid poetics in an ethnographic context? In drawing inspiration from documentary hybrids for my own work and in teaching them as part of my visual anthropology courses I value the way they propose complex epistemologies.These films do not encourage the creation of neat classifications where footage of a fictional nature can be opposed to factual material. In so doing they approach reality as a collaborative endeavor, emerging from the unique encounter between filmmaker and subjects. Hybrids’ in-betweenness calls into question notions of objectivity, established genres, and “discourses of sobriety” (Nichols, 2001, p. 39). Documentary hybrids are particularly effective ways of reflexively approaching storytelling in its own medium, as shown by examples such as Laurent van Lancker’s Surya (2006), an epic tale told in turn by storytellers in twelve different countries, or Paul Wolffram’s Stori Tumbuna (2011), which furtively transforms itself from a stereotypical ethnographic documentary into a Melanesian horror tale. Many of the examples I examined above are reflections on processes of creation of narratives, be they familiar (Stories We Tell), professional (F for Fake) or national (The Act of Killing). Hybrids remind us that documentaries are forms of storytelling, and as such they often consist of simplifications of different versions, stylizations, embellishments, omissions, but above all they are made, referring to both their nature of performed artefacts and their emerging in a specific historical, social and political context. For an ethnographer, documentary hybrids are valuable for the way they approach storytelling as a social process and highlight ways in which the production of ethnographic knowledge can be considered a form of storytelling (see Maggio, 2014).They also allow intimate explorations of the lifeworlds of people who identify as performers and for whom drawing a line between the performing self and the “real” self seems especially preposterous. But how does hybrids’ celebration of ambiguity and their refusal to distinguish between fact and fiction relate to the current events, as some groups and even governments employ the Internet and especially social media to spread disinformation and influence elections through fake news? Some commentators propose to extend journalistic standards to all media that are not entirely fictional, arguing that more rigid definitions framing a work as fictional or accurately reliable would help audiences navigate the myriad versions of each story available in today’s digital world. Debates on writing ethnographic fiction have similarly taken the position of setting clear boundaries in the interest of the credibility of the profession and of respecting its fundamental interest for the lives of other people (Narayan, 1999, pp. 143–144). I believe that the value of documentary hybrids lies in helping to create critical viewers, who actively evaluate what they see and hear instead of passively relying on a stamp that guarantees accuracy. Even F for Fake, which in its playful tone might seem very removed from the gravity of this debate, takes a position by implicitly advising the audience “to remain on guard against any temptation toward gullibility (normally encouraged, it is implied, by documentary discourse)” (Benamou, 2006, p. 146). While not all documentaries encourage gullibility, some formats of journalistic origin, combining talking head interviews with archives or re-enactments, surely promote a pas170

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sive experience by the viewer, yet they remains very popular among filmmakers working on social issues or activist themes.The present times require critical and engaged audiences, who verify their information independently, and documentary hybrids can help encourage this stance, especially if they will expand beyond arthouse festivals and academic contexts. At the same time, it is important to clarify that hybrids are distinct from hoaxes, because while the latter too offer no clue as to the status of their content, most of the hybrids I examine above contain elements that undermine their factual credibility or signal that not the whole content should be taken at face value. These elements put “documentary’s presumption of objectivity to scrutiny” and “engage the spectator in an active process of classification and ‘framing’” (Landesman, 2008, p. 43). Crucially, I see the hybrid filmmaker’s ethical responsibility as being more toward the filmic subjects than toward the viewers. Given the strongly authored character of many documentary hybrids (Merewether, 2009), there are many ways in which the filmmaker’s “truth” could be a misrepresentation of the people depicted in the film, or reflexive self-referential metacommentaries could take over the story to the point of marginalizing the subjects. If we speak of truth, as the documentary studies literature is fond of doing, it must also be that of the filmic subjects, therefore plural and hybrid truths “arising from an insurmountable compromise between subject and recording, suggesting in turn that it is this very juncture between reality and filmmaker that is at the heart of any documentary” (Bruzzi, 2006, p. 9). In order to achieve this end, I use the collaborative and interactive approach of enactive filmmaking, while other makers of documentary hybrids leave their pieces open to multiple voices and interpretations.

References Abu-Assad, H. (2002). Ford transit [35 mm (shot on S16mm)]. Cinephil. Behlil, M., & Oppenheimer, J. (2013).The act of killing:An interview with Joshua Oppenheimer. Cinéaste, 38(3), 26–33. Benamou, C. L. (2006).The artifice of realism and the lure of the “real” in Orson Welles’s F for fake and other t(r)eas(u)er(e)s. In A. Juhasz & J. Lerner (Eds.), F is for phony: Fake documentary and truth’s undoing (pp. 143–170). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Bhabha, H. K. (1994). The location of culture. New York, NY: Routledge. Block, M.W. (1973). No lies [16mm]. Direct Cinema Ltd. Bruzzi, S. (2006). New documentary:A critical introduction (2nd ed.). London/New York: Routledge. Buñuel, L. (1932). Land without bread (also known as Las hurdes,Tierra sin pan, Unpromised land). Kino Video. Eitzen, D. (1995). When is a documentary?: Documentary as a mode of reception. Cinema Journal, 35(1), 81–102. Ferrarini, L. (2008). A migrant’s tale [HD video]. Retrieved from https://lorenzoferrarini.com/portfolio/ migrants-tale/ Ferrarini, L. (2015). Kalanda - The knowledge of the bush [HD video].VHX. Retrieved from http://kalandafilm.com Ferrarini, L. (2017). Enactive filmmaking: Rethinking ethnographic cinema in the first person. Visual Anthropology Review, 33(2), 130–140. Flaherty, R. (1922). Nanook of the north[35mm]. Pathé Exchange. Flaherty, R. (1926). Moana [35mm silent]. Paramount Pictures. Goffman, E. (1956). The presentation of self in everyday life. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh. Grierson, J. (1933).The documentary producer. Cinema Quarterly, 2(1), 7–9. Henley, P. (2009). The adventure of the real: Jean Rouch and the craft of ethnographic cinema. Chicago, IL/London: University of Chicago Press. Herzog, W. (1993). Bells from the deep [Super 16 mm]. Deutsche Kinemathek. Herzog, W. (1998a). Little dieter needs to fly [Super 16 mm].Werner Herzog Filmproduktion. Herzog, W. (1998b). Wings of hope [Super 16mm]. ZDF Enterprises. Herzog, W. (2002a). Herzog on Herzog: Conversations with Paul Cronin. (P. Cronin, Ed.). London: Faber and Faber.

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Lorenzo Ferrarini Herzog,W. (2002b).The Minnesota declaration.Truth and fact in documentary cinema. In P. Cronin (Ed.), Herzog on Herzog: Conversations with Paul Cronin (pp. 301–302). London: Faber and Faber. Kiarostami, A. (1990). Close-up [35mm]. Celluloid Dreams. Landesman, O. (2006). In the mix: Reality meets fiction in contemporary Iranian cinema. Cinéaste, 31(3), 45–47. Landesman, O. (2008). In and out of this world: Digital video and the aesthetics of realism in the new hybrid documentary. Studies in Documentary Film, 2(1), 33–45. Maggio, R. (2014). The anthropology of storytelling and the storytelling of anthropology. Journal of Comparative Research in Anthropology and Sociology, 5(2), 89–106. Marks, L. U. (2000). The skin of the film: Intercultural cinema, embodiment, and the senses. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Merewether, J. (2009). Shaping the real: Directorial imagination and the visualisation of evidence in the hybrid documentary. SCAN - Online Journal of Media Arts and Culture, 6(3). Retrieved from http:// scan.net.au/scan/journal/display.php?journal_id=144 Morin, E. (2003). Chronicle of a film. In S. Feld (Ed.), Ciné-ethnography (vol. 13). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Morris, E. (1988). The thin blue line. Miramax. Narayan, K. (1999). Ethnography and fiction: Where is the border? Anthropology and Humanism, 24(2), 134–147. Nichols, B. (2001). Introduction to documentary. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Oppenheimer, J. (2012). The act of killing [HD video]. Final Cut for Real. Panahi, J. (1997). The mirror [35mm] Rooz Films. Polley, S. (2012). Stories we tell [35mm]. Mongrel Media/Roadside Attractions. Roscoe, J., & Hight, C. (2001). Faking it: Mock-documentary and the subversion of factuality. Manchester/New York, NY: Manchester University Press. Rouch, J., & Morin, E. (1960). Chronique d’un été [16mm].Argos Films. Ruby, J. (2000).The aggie must come first: Robert Flaherty’s place in ethnographic film history. In Picturing culture: Explorations of film and anthropology (pp. 67–94). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Sjöberg, J. (2008). Ethnofiction: Drama as a creative research practice in ethnographic film. Journal of Media Practice, 9(3), 229–242. Turner,V.W. (1969). The ritual process: Structure and anti-structure. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. van Lancker, L. (2006). Surya [35mm]. Dafilms. Vertov, D. (1929). Man with a movie camera [35mm silent]. Ward, P. (2005). Documentary:The margins of reality. London/New York, NY:Wallflower Press. Welles, O. (1974). F for fake [35mm]. Home Vision Entertainment. Werbner, P. P., & Modood,T. (1997). Debating cultural hybridity: Multicultural identities and the politics of antiracism. London: Zed Books. Wolffram, P. (2011). Stori tumbuna:Ancestors’ tales [DV Cam]. DER.

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16 SENSORY VÉRITÉ Kathy Kasic

In creating films, we use camera tools that are modeled after the human eye and microphones that are mechanical replicas of the ear. We focus the lens on textures, so we might give the viewer a sense of what it is like to feel, recognizing that the mind will attribute a sense of touch to a visual stimulus. Incorporating phemonological, sensorial research in anthropology and cognate disciplines has had a varied past, but in recent years there has been a greater interest in recognizing its importance (Pink, 2006). When a film speaks directly to the senses, the viewer may interpret its language on a fundamental, physiological level. However, an approach that only fully develops the sensory components, minimizes the cognitive and linguistic components possibly resulting in a thin description of a culture (Pavsek, 2015). In this chapter I discuss an approach I have been encountering in my own and other filmmakers’ work that I call sensory vérité, fusing the sensory with the cognitive and resulting in a comprehensive approach to ethnographic filmmaking. The sensory vérité film uses observational long takes, haptic images, heightened sound design and combines these with interviews or personal points of view.

Haptic visuality and the sensory foundations Sensory vérité prioritizes the senses to draw in the viewer. Film theorist Laura Marks suggests that the eye can become an organ of touch by activating physical memories of smell, touch, or taste, which she refers to as haptic visuality (2000). Through haptic visuality, she posits that we can convey experience and memory across cultures. By incorporating memories of senses, sights can trigger sounds, and sounds can ignite the sense of touch. Haptic textures allow for a more intimate observation, while the medium of film inherently plays with the neural melding of the senses, known as synesthesia. “Our brain’s natural synesthesia will do it automatically when we are totally immersed in the filmic world, our mirror neurons firing in sympathy with what we see and hear,” observes Nakamura (2013, p. 135). Cognitive researchers have found that when a subject is shown silent visual scenes typically associated with sound, the auditory cortex activates within 100 milliseconds (Proverbio et al., 2011).When we watch movement, we kinesthetically feel as though our body is also moving, something known as a mimetic effect. As Michael Taussig states, mimesis is the “a copying or imitation, and a palpable sensuous connection between the very body of the perceiver and the perceived” (1993, p.16). It is this permeable 173

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boundary between the self and the image that feeds the synesthesia to which our minds are prone, enhancing the sensorial effect. The Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab (SEL) includes a group of filmmakers who are well known for accentuating the texture of the visual and auditory components of their observational-style documentaries.Through this format they aim to immerse the viewer in a place or within a group, rather than in the outside space of the “Other” as traditional ethnographic films have done.We are then allowed to observe an intimate perspective on place through a type of sensory, experiential immersion.This style of filmmaking includes a visual aesthetic, slow pace, lack of non-diegetic music, and a deep commitment to sound design. In fact, sound is so vital to these films that theorist Scott MacDonald commented that “it is typical of SEL films that we hear before we see” (2013, p. 264).These films also rely on long takes in an observational format, thus situating and familiarizing the viewer within a setting. This focus on “place” sensorially immerses the viewer within a single location or group, for example, the ship and fishermen in Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel’s film, Leviathan (2012), the ranchland and ranchers in Sweetgrass (2009) by Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Ilisa Barbash, or the Songhua River and fishermen in Sniadecki’s film Songhua (2007). SEL filmmakers typically handhold the camera, giving the feeling of being connected to their subjects and within their world, in the observational tradition of documentary film. However, they diverge from traditional observation, through the focus on sensory aesthetics. As film theorist Catherine Russell writes, “against the desire for transparency that is supposedly at work in dominant modes of ethnographic film practice, the work of the SEL is designed to produce something more experiential, embodied, and aesthetic” (2015, p. 27). While sensory ethnographic films aim to explore life as it happens, they also tend to exclude expository dialogue or interviews, minimizing an important intimate component of documentary “voice.” SEL filmmaker, Véréna Paravel, argues that removing narration, “affords viewers greater freedom to confront the real and to make sense of the film on their own terms” (Alvarez, 2012, para. 12). While this does allow a certain freedom of the mind, others argue that this eschewal of narration, comprehensible dialogue, and textual devices can create a lack of context for the spectator (Pavsek, 2015). Catherine Russell argues that “it is not clear from the discourse around the film what kind of experience is produced by Leviathan, or the kind of knowledge it produces through that experience” (2015, p. 28). Referring to an SEL film, Manakamana (2013), about a journey to the Manakamana temple in Nepal, anthropologist Sharon Hepburn contends that, “it allows the pleasures of an abstract form with order, system, and pattern, without necessarily dealing with meaning in use and context, by living people” (2016, p. 234). Sensory ethnography does not pretend to be conceptual and is rather insistent on its portrayal of the perceptual (Russell, 2015). In defense of the style, Sniadecki argues that value should be placed on films that are rhetorically ambiguous and sensual (Sniadecki, 2014).While the filmmaker may have this goal in mind, the fact exists that the viewer is always making assumptions and creating a viewpoint to piece together a fragmented reality.While we may claim we do not make films for the viewer and rather for art’s sake, do we not have an ethical obligation to the characters we portray? If there exists a principle in ethnographic filmmaking of developing an understanding of culture or views, then it would seem that films using the word “ethnographic” in many instances ought to incorporate contextual and conceptual devices for their subject, to create a more complete description. Pavsek discusses this through pulling from Alexander Kluge: Kluge frequently refers to a famous passage in the Critique of Pure Reason, where Kant declares: ‘Concepts without content are empty; intuitions without concepts are blind. Hence it is as necessary for the mind to make its concepts sensuous (that is, to join to 174

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them the object in intuition), as to make its intuitions intelligible (that is, to join to them under concepts)’ (Kant 1855[1781]:45; my emphasis). For Kluge, Kant’s maxim contains a dialectical imperative for cinema, an insistence that it constantly mediate between the extremes of intuition and concept, between sensory input or experience and mental processing, if it is to remain true to the ambitions of the Enlightenment. If it does not consistently sustain this mediation, it will tarry at one pole or the other of this opposition and for all intents and purposes devolve into one form of ideology or another, a sort of empty conceptualism on the one hand, or a blind empiricism and a sort of cinematic nominalism on the other. (2015, p. 5) Films in the purist SEL tradition tend to eliminate the majority of comprehensible dialogue, relying on the viewer to interpret the imagery and behavior, without much additional context as to what the motivations and cultural practices are. Russell describes the imagery and sound of Leviathan as textual devices, and states “that viewers will inevitably ‘read’ these textual elements in terms familiar to them, seeking significance in lieu of explanation or information regarding the film’s content” (2015, p. 32). Perhaps we should heed Pavsek’s warning about what the implications are of allowing viewers to make assumptions about the people they are watching, when those individuals have no voice and no control over how they will be depicted conceptually. It leaves us with a thin, blind portrayal of the characters, which is potentially a reckless approach when working in ethnographic film (2015). According to anthropologist Karl Heider, how the local population discusses context is important to a complete ethnographic understanding and allows for a local point of view (2006). If the goal of an ethnographic film is to understand culture and the concepts behind behavior, one must utilize voice. Film thrives on verbal expression, visually through gestures and facial expressions and auditorily through the voice.Theorist David MacDougall contends that in a film, voices express more of the self than the face since the voice belongs to the entire body: Instead of presenting transcriptions of speech, film is able to reproduce almost the full visual and auditory range of verbal expression. This includes gestures and facial expression, but perhaps even more importantly, the voice.Voices are more completely embodied in a film than faces, for the voice belongs to the body.Visual images of people, by contrast, result only from a reflection of light from their bodies. In a corporeal sense, then, these images are passive and secondary, whereas a voice emanates actively from within the body itself: it is a product of the body. (1998, p. 263) Indeed, to include voice in a film results in a more complete character, a “thicker” description than a film that all but silences the voice from the body.This is not to say the pure sensory ethnographic film that minimizes voice has no value in expressing the sensory aspect of a culture. As Sniadecki argues, perhaps there are cases where they should be valued for their ambiguity, that sometimes context is not necessary (2014).While it is not essential to always have this kind of context, there are certain films that will be at a great loss without voice and may solidify prejudiced thinking in viewers. It is the voice that allows us to reach to a more advanced cognition, the sensory techniques and other cinematic devices functioning as catalysts. Sensory vérité then combines sensory ethnography, allowing for the spectator to have agency over their viewing, and layers that with context and substantial dialogue. The “vérité” term I use is a return to the original sense of cinema vérité. Today that term is used interchangeably 175

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to describe filmmaking that carries the auspices of 1950’s observational cinema with its strict attempts to be a “fly-on-the-wall” and the twenty-first-century reality television fabricated to create the illusion of real life.Vérité here describes the style that accesses Jean Rouch’s vision of cinema vérité, which he later accepted as cinema-direct (Rouch and Feld, 2003). Rouch did not wholeheartedly accept the positivism of early American principles of the “fly-on-the-wall” and nonintervention: In these films, Rouch saw a denial of what all ethnographers are forced to learn: that realities are coconstructed and that meanings always change as contexts of interpretation change, continually revealed and modified in numerous ways. Provoking, catalyzing, questioning, and filming are simply strategies for unleashing that revealing process. Rouch insisted that the presence of the camera, like the presence of the ethnographer, stimulates, modifies, accelerates, catalyzes, opens a window … people respond by revealing themselves, and meanings emerge in that revelation. (Rouch and Feld, 2003, p. 16) The sensory vérité films may reveal the context of the individuals who are in front of the camera, and in some subtle or not so subtle way, those who are behind the camera and the deeper sensory elements within that shared environment. What we sense corporeally in our environment is personal and attuned to our individual ways of seeing the world. For Rouch,“filming in personal, narrative and authored styles is a choice made about the most direct and explicit way to grasp the drama of improvised life” (Rouch and Feld, 2003, p. 16). Though ethnographers may want to have a complete record of an event, each camera films only one perspective at a time, so we rely on constructing the film reality based on fragmented moments in real time. As David MacDougall explains, “the choices made leave huge gaps of time, space, and detail, and these become as eloquent as what is actually shown” (MacDougall, 2006, p. 34). It is with this understanding of the eloquent gaps and imperfections of the medium that we can allow ourselves the artistic freedom and even personal sensorial experience, whether it be lingering on a scene visually for cinephilia (Sniadecki, 2014), sonically bringing us into the environment, framing up a tactile detail of an object that would otherwise have gone unnoticed, or altering the scales of time to represent a personal sense of reality, like the slow motion of a trauma. From there a voice from within the film can position context over imagery. It is important to note that I am not describing an expository narration that tells the viewer what to think as a voice of God would. Rather, this is a personal viewpoint that still gives agency to the viewer, to make up his or her own mind in the end.The rhetoric or narrative can still be ambiguous, but the characters are more complete. Sensory vérité is akin to a layered process. First you start with the bottom layer of the sensory, the haptic imagery, the heightened sound design, the character of place, layered with a patient observational, hand-held technique of the vérité tradition.Above that, the interview is infused, occasionally lingering, percolating down to all the other layers, providing context, fodder for the mind and the steam of the imagination. While many documentary films now focus on sound design and cinematic imagery, through the auspices of high production value, what I discuss here are those films with an artistic approach that have purpose rather than aiming to simply make the film feel “cinematic” or “slick.” Rouch had a particular distaste for the “slick” film that relied primarily on technical proficiency: This is why Rouch could not consider the making of film an issue of technical competence. He hated slick films. He had a much greater love of images taken by a moving camera, swimming in social reality as a fish in the sea, rather than perfect shots taken 176

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from a distance on a tripod. Such shots, he often said, were pure voyeurism. ‘This involuntary arrogance in the shooting,’ he writes,‘is not only noticed afterward by the vigilant viewer, it is really felt as such by the people who are filmed as if it was from a watchtower.’ (Rouch, 1979, p. 63, in Colleyn, 2005, pp. 114–115) A number of filmmakers are working in this sensory vérité way, including those in the SEL tradition. In the following sections I will discuss elements of the sensory vérité film, highlighting a few ethnographic films that succeed in these areas, including one of my own. This is by no means a comprehensive list and only serves as a guide to understand the film form.

The interview and the voiceover As ethnographic filmmakers we are faced with several different solutions to the film form. When working with the on-camera interview and vox pop, we can often use either the image with the voice or only the voiceover. Extricating the body from the voice drastically changes the result of the film, as does maintaining the voice and body together in the form of an interview.The time of an interview is often unknown, as if castrated from reality. Since interviews often exist in an alternate time, editing back and forth to the talking head can be jarring, throwing us back and forth in time and space. This non-linear seesaw can be problematic when you consider the flow of a film and it reminds us that there is an editorial process at work, interrupting the narrative device that hides the camera. Using the voiceover alone under imagery in a film can allow it to flow seamlessly. The voice reminds us of the character that is removed from a scene, all the while allowing our senses of vision and audition to carry on simultaneously, placing us within the mind of the interviewee. When we reduce the cutting back and forth to the talking head, the visuals in the film go beyond mere “b-roll” and drift simultaneously with the voice. From 2012 to 2015 I made a documentary called Loose Horses, a film about unwanted horses at a livestock auction that are mostly sold for horsemeat. The issue of using horses for horsemeat is charged with sharp divisions between the animal-rights activists and the ranchers. The problem is in a purgatory, with neither side agreeing about what to do about the over-abundance of horses, while horses suffer the consequences of our inaction, such as being shipped long distances across borders where slaughter is legal, only to then be killed and made into horsemeat there. I wanted to tell this story without an answer, with the sole purpose of inviting conversation, sparking dialogue. Loose Horses is a patient film, contextually framed by the voices from the auction, and sensorially pays particular attention to haptics, intimacy of place.The result is a multi-faceted, morally ambiguous story that instead of using advocacy finds its voice through sensory vérité, holding the viewer inside the auction house, revealing the perspective of the people and horses bounded by human politics. A cowboy named Buzz loosely guides us through this story. He is an unlikely protagonist as a cowboy you don’t expect to have sympathies for, but he provides a moral vantage point as people drop off their horses. In this way, he becomes the person who speaks for the horses, allowing us to see this multi-faceted issue from their perspective. When making a film, we must decide what drives the flow. Instead of starting with the interviews to drive the film, I started with a dedicated aesthetic approach to sound and image and then interviews and vox pops to fill in the context.Without the voice, we would never understand the realities of the horses and the auction attendees. 177

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In departing from the purist tradition of sensory ethnography, J.P. Sniadecki, a member of the SEL, utilizes voice in his films, especially Iron Ministries (2014) and even more so in El Mar La Mar (2017). In Iron Ministries, a documentary about a train ride across China, Sniadecki sparingly uses on camera vox pop interviews, adding dimension to the characters and context to the film. The characters discuss the problems in China, from the high cost of housing, minorities, cultural change, and the power structure of Chinese leadership.Though the voice of the people provides a minimal political discussion of China rather than a deep, intimate portrayal, it does help to expand the character description more than if they had no voice as in previous SEL films. In El Mar La Mar, a film about human migration in the Sonoran Desert, Sniadecki employs voiceover under imagery without visual reference to the interviewee. The voiceover plays under black, and other times under imagery of personal items, a man in camouflage, or water bottles.We do not know exactly whose body the voice comes from or what has become of the person speaking.The disembodied voice creates a disorienting effect when in complete darkness, simulating a sense of being lost and the impending reality of the death and isolation of disorientation. At one point a male voice tells the story of walking with a group of people through the desert until at some point he finds himself alone, all the while we see images of articles of clothing, trash, and generally abandoned personal items. Long takes of the desert fill the time and give us an intimate sense of place. The feeling of wanting to reunite the voices with the bodies is deeply effective and adds to the context in the film flipping the sensory ethnography format of eschewing voiceover on its head, this time eliminating the body and its gestures, leaving those to our imaginations as we see what is left of humanity on the desolate Sonoran landscape.The voice provides the emotional context and human element that we can feel resonating within ourselves. The image of the body seems now only a mortal superficiality. Just as MacDougall contended, the voices themselves represent the body and complete embodiment as they come from the whole self. Interviews have been described as a type of a confessional, where the subject reveals information that allows us to begin to know their mind and character (Nichols, 1991). Within the discussion that the interview originates from, we begin to understand the inner context of another person. Take for example the documentary, directed by Andrew Dominick, One More Time with Feeling (2016), a feature-length film about Nick Cave’s musical process as he grieves the loss of his son.The documentary is filled with long, thoughtful interviews, haptic imagery, altered scales of time, and disjointed voiceover. It utilizes the lingering interview, the interview that continues through um’s and stutters, allowing us to become more a part of the mind of the subject. In this way, the voice of the interview moves into a voice of the inner mind, much like a personal essay documentary might do.This personal interview serves as a confessional to his experience of losing his son. Films can also use the interview as a form of testimony.As an example, This Is History (Afterall) (2014), is a 30-minute film by Roz Mortimer, which records testimony of witnesses to mass killings of Roma families during the Nazi era. She interweaves these with a detailed exploration of the Southern Polish landscape, to create a deeply affecting film that oscillates between the present day and the remembered past, connecting human culture to nature through a detailed analysis of trauma. Mortimer focuses her attention on the pastoral and forested Southern Polish landscapes, mixed with on-camera interviews of the survivors of the Roma Holocaust. She then extracted parts of those interviews and placed them in the film in the form of text and voiceover.The interviews in this film often linger, Mortimer keeps the pauses, “umms” and awkward silence. Throughout the film, Mortimer extracts parts of the interviews and converts them to text or to a child speaking. Each witness has three “voices”:—their own on camera voice, their words as text only, and their memories re-voiced verbatim by a child.This brings the interview 178

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into an interior space, as if it were their thoughts they cannot express verbally, a characteristic of trauma. It also gives the sense that these voices and words are echoed amongst those who did not survive, that they transcend the living. “Using texts creates a certain ‘silencing’ of the words, giving space to the film, space for the sound design to take over, and that’s really important and impossible to do if the voice wasn’t silenced” Mortimer told me, “it takes the viewer into another space, a non-realist space, a kind of in between space where the affect or emotion lives” (R. Mortimer, personal communication, March 1, 2017). These interviews then provide personal perspective to the testimony. It is important to note that the interviewer should approach the interviewee to make them feel at ease, as there is an inherent power structure of confessor and interrogator that can alter what the subject will say (Nichols, 1991). How the interview is conducted and whether the interviewer minimizes the power structure has important implications for the tone of the film.

The character of place Films in both the sensory ethnographic style and sensory vérité immerse the viewer in a single place or with a group, rather than remain in the outside space of the “Other.” Environmental author Barry Lopez suggests that the intimacy of place is quite important to us. He writes,“the effort to know a place deeply is, ultimately, an expression of the human desire to belong, to fit somewhere” (Lopez, 2015, para. 8). Perhaps if a film can reveal the character of a place and invite the audience to become an intrinsic part of that setting, audience members can become more deeply connected to the linguistic argument. Lopez discusses how once we have connected to a certain place, can we then allow for other experiences to take hold. In a film, it is important to allow for enough time for the viewer to engage with the environment, to patiently linger on long takes of the space. Lopez describes his experience walking with indigenous people through the forest and their increased awareness of their surroundings. He writes When an observer doesn’t immediately turn what his senses convey to him into language, into the vocabulary and syntactical framework we all employ when trying to define our experiences, there’s a much greater opportunity for minor details, which might at first seem unimportant, to remain alive in the foreground of an impression, where, later, they might deepen the meaning of an experience. (Lopez, 2015, para. 1) The idea of allowing the character of a place to unfold in time is relevant in a film as well. Just as we need time with an individual character, we also need time to understand the character of place. An environment speaks through the sensory language, that which we are used to understanding and thereby capable of connecting. Long takes give us the opportunity to experientially note details about the environment we might otherwise have missed had we been engaged in a linguistic argument.Thus, by providing a slower pace in a setting, we engage and immerse the audience in a setting. In the film Nostalgia for the Light (2010) by Patricio Gúzman, widows search for the bones of loved ones left by Pinochet’s massacres, interwoven with footage of scientists searching for stars. Gúzman develops the narrative by establishing the sense of place through long takes revealing the expansive Atacama Desert. Lying buried underneath hides the trauma of a generation affected by the horrors of Pinochet’s regime, which we come to understand through extended interwoven interviews. In the sky above, scientists search for stars looking for the same carbon that fills the bones of the dead in the desert.The film develops the environment 179

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as a character hiding a past human history and reducing humanity to the elements of carbon in an infinite space. In This Is History (Afterall), we connect to the voices through an intimate immersion in the Polish countryside. The film lingers on long takes of the landscapes through trees, allowing visions of mounded graves grown over by nature and time.These scenes are seemingly peaceful spaces that at one time held the horrors that no human should know. Anne Aghion’s film Ice People is remarkable in its detailed depiction of a group of geologists on the ice in Antarctica. Though filled with interviews, the filmmakers allow time for us to observe the environment. We live the life of a geologist, remaining on the windy, cold continent, digging in the ground looking for answers. It is this adherence to place where the film succeeds in giving us an insight into the subtle details of that lifestyle and its query into the natural world. In Loose Horses, the setting of the livestock auction allows us to become submerged in the moral ambiguity of the horsemeat trade and this livestock auction in general. Several long takes in this film represent important elements that serve to engage the viewer in the stockyard environment developing an intimacy of place. For example, the long take of horse #1052 as he walks down the auction corridor, represents an important turning point. At this point we shift from being the outside viewer, to being inside, with a horse, whose character we begin to understand through his reticence to move forward.We are now “stuck” in the auction and just like the horse, who seems to not want to be there.The intimacy of place establishes us in the single location and serves a purpose to give us a united perspective with the character of the horse and that of the auction house. The visual and auditory rhetoric in El Mar La Mar describes a harsh and desolate plight facing those who find themselves in the brutal migration North. Sniadecki isolates us on this landscape, we are trapped, lost when it is dark and thirsting for water, even a murky babbling brook gives us little reprieve.This adherence to the setting is highly effective in establishing the character of the environment. By the middle of the film we are fully engaged within the space, we have not been given a way out and must now recognize the trauma and pain associated with fleeing a country for another whose arms are not open, but rather passively and actively inhumanely folded.Without the ability to sensorially connect to that landscape, perhaps we would not be as able to fully grasp the plight of the migrator.

Tactile sound, haptic visuality, and alterations of time Haptic perception allows the audience to sense the image in an embodied way, since the image invokes sensory memories of touching and/or being touched. Film theorist Jennifer Barker explains, “exploring cinema’s tactility thus opens up the possibility of cinema as an intimate experience and of our relationship with cinema as a close connection, rather than as a distant experience of observation” (2009, p. 2, original emphasis). In this view, film is not mainly appreciated through a visual perception, rather, it theorizes that the image on screen can affect the whole body, be it to the skin or on deeper levels. In keeping with the sensory immersive tradition, El Mar La Mar is filled with haptic soundscapes: mournful owls hooting into the night, the hollow sound of the wind across the desert, thick flapping wings of bats in a dark cave, crackling radio sounds of the patrol reporting across the airwaves about bodies found deceased. Iron Ministries uses haptic shots of the train throughout the film: the pink woven curtain over the window with a woman’s painted fingernails, the patterned floor of the railcar, the piles of trash on the floor and the strobing effects of lights and landscape outside the train windows. Ice People also incorporates a significant amount of detailed visual and aural elements such as the wind blowing through camp, across the frozen landscape, 180

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flags flapping in the wind, the sound of sizzling food, extended close-ups of peat moss in a petri dish, and close-up shots revealing the transient textures of water vapor. The film depicts an experience of a way of life, in part accomplished through its use of textured imagery of its many detailed, haptic shots. In Loose Horses, the close-up images of the horse’s hair and fine details of the horse’s stalls allows us to imagine we can feel the horse’s hair and touch the filthy grounds of the livestock auction. In terms of the sound design, the sound of the gates and the whinnies of the horses occur as recurring motifs throughout the film. The sound of the auction gates is grating, rhythmic, and tonal, reverberating through the bones of the inner ear. Throughout This Is History (Afterall), the sound of cars is a reappearing motif throughout the film. It is the inhuman sound of an engine, of industry; rattling like an abstract sound of a gun, giving texture to the disruptive nature of trauma. Changing the speed of time can add dimension to perspective in a film.Time is slowed down for effect in various moments throughout Loose Horses, to bring in an interior point of view of the horse.The slow motion of the horses toward the trailer serves to invite the viewer to underscore the agony of the horse and the consequences of what lies ahead, the slaughterhouse, which we never see. Throughout her film, This Is History (Afterall) Mortimer also alters time, slows it down or speeds it up for affect as in the scenes of the trees where the shallow burial grounds were. The juxtaposition of the interview, observational footage, the altered space of time, and sound design all serve to connect us to the interior space of trauma and memory in this Polish landscape. Similar to how Loose Horses never shows the actual slaughter of the horses, This Is History (Afterall) never shows archival footage of mass graves because the viewer is fully capable of finding that in their imagination and bringing forth, perhaps more powerfully and with a kind of openness that you wouldn’t find with an indexical image.

Conclusion The films described above all work primarily via the senses, relying heavily on visual and aural elements to heighten the sensory response. With the sensory engagement and contextual use of the vérité style, the viewer is placed directly in the environment with the subjects. For filmmakers who are aiming to make ethnographic films, sensory vérité offers an effective technique for an inclusive portrayal of a culture. While many documentaries include moments of sensory vérité, it is unusual for a vérité film to be composed entirely through the sensory. Responses to these experiential approaches are quite individual and subjective. As Mortimer writes, “what moves one person might not move their neighbor, so we take a risk when foregrounding our storytelling” (Mortimer, personal communication, March 1, 2017). The effect of mixing vérité with the sensory leads to a film that dives into a complete mindset, into the linguistic, into the subconscious, into those sensory parts of ourselves where we find our natural state of being, where we connect to the character and the environment.With this, perhaps we can begin breaking down the barriers of cultural preconceptions and ideological notions.

References Alvarez, P. (2012). Interview with Verena Paravel and J. P. Sniadecki. Fieldsights: Visual and new media review. Cultural Anthropology Online. Retrieved February 2019 from http://www.culanth.org/fieldsights/ 33-interview-with-verena-paravel-and-j-p​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ sniadecki Barker, J. (2009). The tactile eye:Touch and the cinematic experience. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Colleyn, J. (2005). Jean Rouch: An anthropologist ahead of his time. American Anthropologist, 107(1), 113–116. Heider, K. (2006). Ethnographic film (revised ed.). Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.

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17 ETHNOCINEMA Anne Harris

Ethnocinema is a non-representational strategy that pivots on two-way creative and cultural exchange in the research creation process. Rather than using video as an emerging research tool that—either naturalistically or impressionistically—still “captures data,” ethnocinema focuses on the relationships that emerge while the video-based research is being made. Ethnocinema is a practice by which co-participants mutually explore cultural orientations through a range of video strategies, focusing on relationship-building and decentering the means of production, dissemination, and interpretation about which so much video-informed research remains preoccupied. While it grows out of an anthropological and visual ethnographic tradition, it does not ascribe to traditional social scientific understandings of ethnography as a practice that documents the “other” for consumption by a largely western/European audience (see Spray, this book), and shares more with the ways in which cultural geography has in the last decade advanced a theory of non-representation (Lorimer, 2005). What makes ethnocinema a unique blend of non-representational theory (NRT) and video ethnography is its foregrounding of creative-relational enquiry (Wyatt, 2019); ethnocinema not only rejects representation, it attends to relationships first and foremost. While there are many researchers using video and film in creative and sometimes non-representational ways, ethnocinema is useful for those wishing to build relationships and mutuality in the research practice, rather than producing “data” or outputs. In its rejection of one-way researcher-researched relationship, ethnocinema encourages social change by using the ethnographic method to mutually explore rather than pursue generalizable representation of cultures or cultural traits. In today’s research climate of creative, collaborative, and do-it-yourself methods that decenter research practices, ethnocinema offers a digital tool that can be collaborative both face-to-face or virtually, and that can be globally circulatable as either artifacts, works-in-progress, or live-streamed cultural exchange. By focusing on research as relationship-building, ethnocinema places creative methods at the forefront of leading research away from representation and toward research-based activities for social inclusion and social change. Building on decolonizing and critical ethnographic theory (Clifford, 1988), ethnocinema rejects static notions of culture and representation.Yet, while part of the project of ethnocinema is to provoke debate about both terms, it sits within the disciplines of cultural studies and ethnography which employ both. Gayatri Spivak (1990) has argued that it is impossible to avoid essentializing representations about culture, and that the most strategic intervention may be to 183

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engage critically in the cultural politics of representation through self-representation, with more attention to context.Yet Spivak’s argument preceded the cultural shifts provoked by social media and online cultures, which continue to demonstrate how fast-moving digital self-representation and its morphology are. In both research and non-research contexts, selfie cultures are increasingly practices, not products. These popular and critical evolutions of contemporary culture challenge a politics of representation in ways that make ethnocinema increasingly timely. The generational, scholarly, and technical differences between contemporary video research and French visual anthropologist Jean Rouch’s cine-ethnography (Rouch and Feld, 2003) continue to inform the politics and possibilities of ethnocinema. At the heart are the nimble, personal digital devices that now make so much of modern life a movie.Yet has the evolution of digital video added to the ethnographic project of understanding “the other”? That question informs the collaborative and two-way cultural exchange of ethnocinema; a video practice that cannot be performed alone, or in a mono-directional way. In this way, ethnocinema is inherently non-representational and its artifacts embody the relational rather than any attempt at cultural essentializing. By exploring together what culture appears to be, ethnocinematic collaborators paradoxically break down what previous generations of ethnographers may have sought to document as static and identifiable notions of culture.

Ethnocinema: beyond representation The crisis of representation in artistic practice in general has had three main preoccupations: the status of the output, artifact, or artwork; its relation to the viewer; and the relation of the making process to the institution (broadly conceived).With regard to video in particular, the crisis of representation has given rise to work which explicitly challenges the methodological means and objectives of traditional documentary filmography.The evolution of ethnocinema draws on emerging non-representational methodological and stylistic practices from a range of theorists and practitioners such as Hito Steyerl, Simon Tormey, and Phillip Vannini. Documentary filmmaker and cultural critic Hito Steyerl writes on the commodification and corporatization of the art world and digital media. Steyerl has extended the term “postrepresentation” in regard to the work that video in particular can do in challenging the militarization of everyday culture, issues of digital privacy and surveillance, and formal questions about video as art. She addresses, broadly, the socio-technological conditions of visual culture and the relationship between representation, identification, and the relationship between art and capital. Steyerl’s (2013) film How Not to Be Seen:A Fucking Didactic Education .Mov File, offers five tongue-in-cheek lessons in invisibility.These lessons include how to (1) make something invisible for a camera; (2) be invisible in plain sight; (3) become invisible by becoming a picture; (4) be invisible by disappearing; and (5) become invisible by merging into a world made of pictures. Ethnocinema is informed by the kinds of critical examination of sociality in/through digital technologies present in Steyerl’s work.A commitment to making culturally informed collaborative video requires the partners to critically interrogate the affordances and constraints of contributing to the proliferation of digital video in popular culture, particularly those used for/with surveillance. Steyerl’s artistic and political commitment to making people think about technology in more critical ways does not detract from her attention to aesthetics and to the role of the human in her work, as is also true in ethnocinema. While Steyerl asks whether invisibility or hypervisibility is empowering or dehumanizing, ethnocinema asks whether human belonging practices are helped or hindered by being framed and/or analyzed as cultures. Steyerl’s “politics of post-representation” (2013, n.p.) asserts that the representations begin to make us, leading us in unprecedented ways toward what others wish us to see, and to not see. 184

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Informed by Steyerl, ethnocinema takes video and cultural exploration beyond the traditional methodology of ethnography to focus on the unforeseen, the emergent, the relational. If Steyerl asks us to be more rigorous in our questioning of images, videos, and the price of circulability, ethnocinema asks practitioners to question whether we make culture, or whether culture makes us through an acceptance of representation.With a move to more intimate, interpersonal video events, we can explore what is specific about us and our contexts, whether we choose to call these cultures or not. Further, ethnocinema implies that if we reject the very notion of an ethnography that can represent a “culture,” then collaborative video practices like ethnocinema can move beyond these traditional discursive limitations and move toward material exchanges and events, a video-in-the-making. Non-representational strategies like ethnocinema demand a re-examination of both practices and values. Ethnocinema seeks ways of moving beyond speaking-for as a constraint, much like Philip Vannini’s (2015) work on the potential of non-representation as a key philosophical project underpinning such theoretical movements such as new materialisms, posthumanism, and affect theory.Vannini, like ethnocinema, invites us to leave the solid but unsustainable ground of representation and move instead toward the richness and compelling unanswerable methodological questions in an ethico-onto-epistemological move away from research practices as proof-making, and rather as emergent, situational, and sustainable human and more-thanhuman relations.1 Not ascribing to traditional or representational notions of culture, however, does not mean ethnocinematographers can’t explore culture and our places within it. Ethnocinema asks us to abandon the safety of a politics of representation which might seduce researchers into believing summative or static analyses of culture, cultural flows, or cultural selves. One theoretical contribution of ethnocinema is its invitation to think in more fluid terms about culture and the dangers of cultural representation. If we are not seeking to represent culture through ethnographic work, then what is left? Similarly, political theorist Simon Tormey (2015) writes about the difficulty of analyzing Occupy and other social movements in a representational way, and problematizes the persistent preoccupation in visual, digital, and social media cultures to always return to visuality as representational, rather than as an enactment, event, or becoming-with. While Tormey and others have identified 1968 as a socio-cultural pivot in the decline of representational aesthetics and a move toward social movement, protest and activist cultures, and collective practices, the difficulties of moving in practical terms away from such dichotomies (representation/non-representation) remain challenging in approaches like ethnocinema. For researchers, both beginning and more experienced, how to do ethical research innovation is as important as the why.

Ethnocinema as a creative-relational research practice The benefits of ethnocinema include the dynamism of a participatory research methodology grounded in multi-sensory, performative, and relational doing-with.As discussed, such methodologies are not limited to simply “data gathering” along multiple axes. Ethnocinema, even more than other participatory methods, foregrounds the collaborative approach from the conceptualization of the research project right through to its conclusion. Ethnocinema uses moving images but is not limited to one style, tool, or approach. In this way, it is more a research strategy than a method; that is, its organizing principle is mainly its social change orientation, and the flexible tool of digital video to explore difference, and sameness. Its tools can include smartphones, flip cams, GoPro action cameras, and more professionalquality video cameras. It can incorporate online platforms like SnapChat, Instagram, Facebook, 185

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Vimeo,YouTube, and more. Unlike traditional ethnography, it is as much about self-documenting as it is about exploring the other. It is also about self-documenting and sharing culture, not about representation.As social media have increasingly taught researchers that self-documenting is not the same as “representation,” and shouldn’t be considered in a static way that can be generalized to “young people” or any other cultural group, ethnocinema similarly uses digital tools to explore how we interact and in so-doing see ourselves differently. But how is this different from the longstanding questions of representation, especially in visual work? Recent developments in post-qualitative and creative-relational inquiry poke around in places which see ecological, interconnected, and post-paradigmatic enquiries as becomingwith, rather than staking claims of expertness. Ethnocinema’s creative-relational orientation foregrounds process over product, through creating collaboratively with single or multiple “others” (including more-than-human ones).This is a repurposing of research labor, resources, and relationships as urgently co-implicated, which entails discarding the kind of attention to sole expert researchers—or as Judith Butler puts it, a “single and unified subject” (Butler, 2015, p. 156) whose main goal is to assert its authority or will. Ethnocinema strives to create a “we-search,” or what Judith Butler calls “assembling a we,” to create a community of makers, scholars, and activists committed to speaking and embodying a collective and popular “will” (Butler, 2015, p. 156; see also Holman Jones, 2016). In the politics of this “collective we,” ethnocinematic post-representation moves beyond the material/ discursive binary that dominates much of new materialist scholarship and focuses on making in a processual way, not on its outputs. Ethnocinema always asks us to push beyond ourselves as researchers and makers in relational and creative ways that take us (and research) forward together. Like post-qualitative inquiry, creative-relational inquiry also builds researcher tolerance for allowing the work to emerge rather than predetermine research designs or even methods.While those two methodologies are situated primarily in narrational or writing practices, they—like ethnocinema—find emergent creative research approaches to be both theoretically and processually expansive. In his formulation of “creative-relational inquiry” Jonathan Wyatt (2019) draws on Brian Massumi’s definition of creative-relational and extends it to become a process of inquiry.Wyatt makes reference to writing (a textual focus that some post-representational scholars eschew), not video or film, but his theorization of the creative-relational contains the dynamic emergent interpersonal kind of intra-action that Barad describes when she argues the now-ness of an event. Both Brian Massumi and Jonathan Wyatt articulate a creative-relational inquiry that is both immediate and affective, like ethnocinema. Affect describes the intensities or impulses that move between collaborators when engaged in an event like making videos together; the intangible electricity that requires bodies to be present, sharing an activity, and attending to one another. Wyatt describes this as “a process of becoming that takes it … beyond ourselves, into the other” (2019, p. 42), much like ethnocinema. This does not mean, however, that ethnocinematic collaboration must be between colocated bodies; indeed, research on connective media and virtual collaboration reminds us that collaborating remotely is still in-relation but loses the affect of proximity. Wyatt’s description of the creative-relational way of researching can be applied directly to ethnocinema in that, “creative-relational inquiry is about movement, about process.The creative-relational keeps us guessing, is marked by its unfolding, by the promise of the not-yet, by unpredictability” (2019, p. 45).The freedom of a research process that is unfolding is exhilarating but can be challenging in its open-endedness. Ethnocinema belongs to an expanding range of video strategies in research practices including, to name a few, video and sensory ethnography (Pink, 2012), non-representational video 186

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(Rose, 2012; Steyerl and Olivieri, 2013), participatory and collaborative applied video (Milne, Mitchell, and DeLange, 2012), documentary (Nichols, 2010), and a range of social media-linked online and interactive tools. Furthermore, Nigel Thrift’s (2008) foundational work on NRT is now influencing a range of disciplines at the methodological level. Ethnocinema begins both conceptually and practically with the premise that the researcher is a co-participant in this collaborative endeavor, one who is committed to both taking and leaving, sharing and receiving with the co-participant collaborators. But what makes ethnocinema ethnographic if the focus is primarily on the relational, a relational that defies cultural generalizations? Its relational focus means that it prioritizes the process and the relationship that emerges from that process, over any artifact that is produced or retained as an “output” of the research activity. Ethnocinema as a relational practice has been evolving since Jean Rouch first coined cine-ethnography and pioneered attendant innovative techniques and collaborative approaches. Anthropologists Sam Pack (2000) and Harald Prins (1989) wrote about early notions of “ethnocinema” but stuck with culturally descriptive goals, which they linked to cultural aesthetics. Their work resisted what Jay Ruby considered legitimate ethnographic film, work that must be done by university-employed sociocultural anthropologists! Obviously, times have changed since then, but can ethnocinema move into more public and popular cultural spaces and practices? Certainly, the rise of social media and other interactive technologies make that increasingly possible. If ethnocinema is oriented toward political, processual, and aesthetic affinities rather than anthropological ones, it has the power to enact culturally imbued creativity, reminding us that all research and creative endeavor today are inflected with both localized knowledge and global awareness of self and other. Ethnocinema builds on these dual understandings, while at the same time making possible collaboration across diverse contexts and large distances. Ethnocinema can be considered a child of James Clifford’s well-circulated argument that all ethnographic representations are partial truths, but it also provokes researchers to challenge truth-claims as a goal of research at all. If ethnocinema began as a way of documenting “dying” cultures or even to “empower” disenfranchised communities, it is now actively becoming a space of experimentation of relationship-building through doing. The focus on cultures becomes a mutual exploration of communities, ways of being, or orientations rather than identities, and extends beyond ethnic or geographic to political, philosophical, or virtual (Harris, 2016a). If the relationship-building aspect of ethnocinema is its distinguishing feature, this is also its most notable difference from other ethnographic video methods.The relational in ethnocinema extends through mutuality in its conceptual as well as its processual nature, not just a tokenistic or partial notion of collaboration. As a practice rather than a method of completing research, ethnocinema enacts an ethos of knowledge creation as a relationship and event that works between, across, and through us as both of and beyond culture. A shared characteristic of all participatory video approaches is that the process is often foregrounded over the product. As a relational practice, ethnocinema shares this priority, but also problematizes the limitations of such a binarized product versus process view of video-informed research creation. The intimacy as well as circulability of work made with everyday tools like phones and computers is one reason why video-informed research is expanding the fields of intercultural and intersectional research. Digital devices have certainly helped re/create how research is performed, and for whom, but also who has access to making it. Digital tools invite the agency of participants in ways that were not possible before in power-imbalanced research relationships. The commitment of ethnocinema to two-way vulnerability, creation, and dissemination go some way toward leveling the playing field of research creation and academic knowledge production. 187

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Through the framework of ethnocinema, co-participants have the opportunity to consider the value or limitations of culture, through one-to-one relationships. This is ethnography at both the micro- and the macro-level at once, ethnography that explores global flows rather than static cultures, using an appropriately contemporary and flexible tool like digital video. Cultural anthropologist Arjun Appadurai2 conceptualized cultural practices and identities differently for a digital and globally mobile time, a time characterized by the kinds of global flows and mediatized social encounters to which ethnocinema has evolved to respond. He suggested ways in which “we might collaborate intersubjectively within these flows” (Appadurai, 1996, p. 37). Both migration and media are interwoven with boundary-crossing of all kinds, including methodologically: these intersubjective, intercultural negotiations that are increasingly characteristic of global culture lie at the center of ethnocinematic research practices. Ethnocinema—like Appadurai’s notion of a social imaginary—pivots on the “conditions under which current global flows occur: they occur in and through the growing disjunctures” which are accelerating in “speed, scale and volume” (Appadurai, 1996, p. 37). Ethnocinema offers a creative collaborative research tool that is flexible enough to meet the accelerating speed and scale of contemporary research, while keeping the focus firmly on the interpersonal. By providing a moment of encounter, one centered around mutual digital video creation, this practice is more than method, more than strategy; it becomes an agent for activation of radical listening, noticing, and attending to the self and other across difference. A range of roles and practices can be employed in an ethnocinematic relationship or encounter. Ethnocinema is not artificially about how much footage each of us shoots of one another, although of course it does attend to processual negotiations. More importantly, ethnocinema’s ethos demands a decentring of the researcher as expert, a rejection of the use of video to frame others in an analytic or objectifying way, and to completely eschew the right of research to typify others’ experience. This is the heart of ethnocinema’s epistemological and ontological differentiation, a refocus on the practice of doing something together as activism, rather than employing any kind of analytic distance to make pronouncements about others.3

Doing ethnocinema The range of styles, approaches, and outcomes possible in ethnocinematic engagement can perhaps best be understood through diverse examples.The website of the Creative Agency research lab at RMIT University houses multiple examples of ethnocinematic projects at www.creativeresearchhub.com. Some exemplary projects of mine in particular are Culture shack; SAILing into university!; Creative capacities; Art/hope/culture; and Teaching diversities.These projects embody a wide range of aspects of ethnocinema. For example, the project Art/hope/culture demonstrates intercultural exchange in the ways both the artworks were created by migrant women artists as well as by the interview process. Art/Hope/Culture offers an example of an ethnocinematic approach or ethos rather than strict method, given that the research and artistic relationships between the two researchers and ten co-participants emerged from collaborative discussions about the effects of migration on women artists, how it impacted our practices, careers, and the content of our work.This project is ethnocinematic not because all participants collaborated mechanically in the videomaking, but through the cultural exchange, the collaborative development of the work, and the sharing of artwork as a site of cultural differences/sameness. In this project the shared videomaking provided an opportunity to mutually exchange cultural and artmaking practices through the 188

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lens of migration. In this way, the participants helped to shape the direction and nature of the investigation of the migrant experience into our shared experiences as artists, rather than being based upon differentiated roles as researcher and researched, and the power dynamics and alienation embedded in such hierarchies. Exemplars of ethnocinematic methods and relationships can be found in Culture hack, the videos in Ethnocinema (Harris, 2012), and Cross-marked, a project that showcases one way in which video-based collaborations (research or otherwise) open up new channels for teachers and students to collaborate across the many divides that exist within schools and education hierarchies. Together these projects evidence several key characteristics of ethnocinema. Amongst other qualities ethnocinema: • • • • •

Seeks transparency and rejects invisibility of the filmmaker, both aesthetically as well as methodologically. Foregrounds collaboration and diminishes authorial interpretation. Celebrates the individual over the generalizable. Privileges preferences process over product. Commits to mutual vulnerability and exchange rather than one-way interrogation.

These key characteristics highlight some of the primary methodological differences between ethnocinema-as-process and the more prevalent aesthetic focus of much ethnographic film. As research products, often film outputs formally dictate audience expectations on aesthetic conventions, thus making less-finished video and filmic outputs disappointing in conventional terms. Ethnocinema and other process-oriented arts-based methods, instead, continue to remind scholarly and popular audiences that there are a range of diverse aesthetics that dictate “successful” outputs. Arts-based research methods do not all attend to a finished output that can or should be measured against other arts products that are created for that primary purpose. In what follows I am going to outline three broad considerations when initiating an ethnocinematic collaboration.

Step 1: Finding common ground An ethnocinematic researcher and their collaborator/s begin by identifying a shared community or cultural aspect of themselves that they wish to explore in their video project. Culture can be defined as any practice-oriented, self-identified perspective or subjective category claimed as meaningful by the co-participants. An example would be a cultural identifier such as LGBTQ or adoptee; others might include self-identified cultures of first-in-family university student as well as more traditional cultural groupings. Ethnocinematographers see culture as neither defined nor bounded by geography and think broadly and critically about the ways in which, through a creative-relational inquiry, culture can be productively broadened to be considered as more of a community of practice than a set of essentializing identity categories. Such groupings are marked by imagined communities (Anderson, 2006) that increasingly take precedence over nation-state, corporate, and other more conventional cultural cohesion principles. In ethnocinema the social order or intersubjectivity is co-created or co-constitutive, identity categories such as subject and researcher become obsolete and are ultimately replaced by a collective of co-creators who make sense of one another and their experiences in the exchange between them. So, ethnocinematographers ask themselves “what do we have in common” as a way to start building a dialogue and problematizing notions of difference and sameness. 189

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Step 2: Making-with as agile inquiry Step 2 consists of the various processes required to make something together. By using the creative-relational process of making videos together the co-creators of ethnocinema may take turns in the filming, speaking, acting, and choosing of content.The doing-together of ethnocinema signals a shift from static to fluid notions of cultural and community-formation and reflects changing enquiry at the heart of ethnographic research, including what it might look like if the work of documenting cultures becomes the work of documenting movement and relationships (Harris, 2014b). As such, it uses performative “communities of sentiment” (Appadurai, 1996, p. 8), and gestures toward the ways in which video can provide creative tools for doing data differently, rather than objectifying video data as multi-modal outputs to be worked. In ethnocinema, given that relationships are at the center of the work, it is important to cocreate video together from beginning to end. Of course, there are practical limits to this, which must be respected. Some community members, for example, may wish to be involved but may have limited time or interest in all the technical aspects required of a project.Alternatively, if one partner does not wish to appear in front of the camera, there is no imperative that this must happen.What is required, however, is that the concept and content of the project is codetermined, and this includes the central focus of the filmic enquiry.A tokenistic, after-the-fact collaboration in the execution only, is not ethnocinematic. Flexibility in the method means that in both the output and in the practice of co-creative making there may be considerable variation; no one approach is preferred over another.This can result in an ethnocinematic project in which only one or some of the collaborators are featured in the artifact but where the conceptual and editorial work of the project have been carried out together.The ethos of co-creating (or creative-relational work) must remain foregrounded throughout the project, and this is what makes a project ethnocinematic. As research, any kind of analysis of the creative work then becomes an analysis of the creative-relational process, rather than the artifact/s. Unlike traditional exegeses that often accompany creative research projects, an ethnocinematic exegesis (or commentary) does not focus on the artifact, but rather always remains focused on the relational process.

Step 3: Converting to action Ethnocinematographers should: • • • • •

Form a small group or pair with whom to work. Brainstorm together what similarities/differences will be addressed in this collaboration. Agree on the topic the project will address. Ask themselves who their audience is (may be multiple). Share roles; everyone must actively participate in co-creation—whether in filming, editing, acting, storyboarding, etc. (employing a DIY ethic).

A crucial part of the making process, analysis occurs at multiple layers, including an analysis of the process first and foremost, but also analysis of the video artifacts themselves and how they may or may not represent truth-claims to audiences who view them out of context. This is particularly true (and problematic) in the analysis demanded of doctoral researchers or those in disciplines which may take more traditional approaches to visual ethnography (Harris, 2016b). Many of my ethnocinematic video outputs are also (and importantly) made for public dissemination, through negotiation with my co-participants. It was important to them that the 190

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films be shared publicly at, for example, film festivals and online. One result of this “real world” dissemination ability of film and video is that the artifacts are then analyzed in the public domain, independently of the collaborative process that informed their creation. While these multiple audiences and disseminations provided useful and important opportunities for further dialogue (both intercultural and artistic), the participants noted the more powerful impacts resulted from conversation between the participants and their friends and family members as they shared the films with those in their lives. In this way, ethnocinematic projects are also always concerned with audience from the point of view of the co-participants, rather than academic notions of “impact” from a scholarly point of view. Process and application variables both point to the richness and also the challenges inherent in working with an ethnocinematic version of video ethnography.As video continues to stretch the possibilities and constraints of academic research, scholars and our collaborators should continue to interrogate the ways in which changes in technology and dissemination affect core aspects of research practices.Video and film research methods can still often fall into the trap of objectivity and verisimilitude, in which audiences believe (or want to believe) that what they are seeing is a kind of authenticity made possible by video’s ability to record in so-called real time. Ethnocinema rejects these truth-claims but also calls for a more robust engagement with the future possibilities of video and moving image research. As virtual reality and other digital innovations proliferate, ethnocinema calls for technological innovation to remain tethered to interpersonal and intercultural goals. For all these conceptual and methodological possibilities, ethnocinema presents one video-based innovation in research practices and relationships that promises to enrich both outputs and practices.

Conclusion This chapter has attempted to detail some methodological and conceptual characteristics of ethnocinema.Throughout this writing I have offered a starting point for researchers wishing to identify links between the conceptual and practical considerations of the approach, while also providing some insight into the commitments required to engage in productive ethnocinematic research relationships, which above all are mutual and require investment from both sides of the research relationship. At the heart of ethnocinema is the belief that while individual research outputs and/or data sets all suffer from limitations in regard to the social change they can affect, this method focuses on intercultural collaboration and through such relationships it hopes to advance both aesthetic and research understandings in a range of contexts. Finally, as an emerging practice that highlights collaborative cultural videomaking rather than reinforcing binaries of difference which have characterized conventional culturally attended projects including post-colonialism and multiculturalism, ethnocinema’s political and methodological commitments remain focused on expanding traditional approaches to research methods, and to deconstructing definitions of culture itself.

Notes 1 For more on such questions framed as post-qualitative enquiry, see for example St. Pierre (2019) and Ulmer (2018). 2 Appadurai identifies five “scapes” that constitute the global cultural flow: mediascapes, ethnoscapes, technoscapes, ideoscapes, and financescapes. 3 For more on problematizing the cultural aspect of ethnocinema, see Harris and Nyuon (2012) and Harris (2011a, 2011b, 2011b, 2014a, 2014b, 2015, 2016a.)

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References Anderson, B. (2006). Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. New York, NY: Verso. Appadurai, A. (1996). Modernity at large: Cultural dimensions of globalization. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Butler, J. (2015). Notes toward a performative theory of assembly. Boston, MA: Harvard University Press. Clifford, J. (1988). The predicament of culture. Boston, MA: Harvard University Press. Harris,A. (2011a). Slowly by slowly: Ethnocinema, media and the young women of the Sudanese diaspora. Visual Anthropology, 24(4), 329–344. Harris, A. (2011b). Someone’s private zoo: Ethnocinema and the other. Qualitative Research Journal, 11(1), 62–79. Harris, A. (2012). Ethnocinema: Intercultural arts education. Berlin: Springer Science & Business Media. Harris, A., & Nyuon, N. (2012). People get tired: African Australian cross-cultural dialogue and ethnocinema. In P.Vannini (Ed.), Popularizing research: Engaging new media, new audiences, new genres (pp 19–24). New York, NY: Peter Lang. Harris, A. (2014a). Ethnocinema and the impossibility of culture. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 27(4), 546–560. Harris, A. (2014b). Ethnocinema: Intercultural collaborative video as method. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Ltd. Harris, A. (2015). Ethnocinema and video-as-resistance. In A. Hickey-Moody & T. Page (Eds.), Arts, pedagogy and cultural resistance: New materialisms (pp 153–168). London: Rowman & Littlefield. Harris, A. (2016a). Ahmed, affect and the social imaginary in ethnocinema. In P. Burnard & E. Mackinlay (Eds.), The international handbook of intercultural arts (pp 82–900). London: Routledge. Harris,A. M. (2016b). Video as method. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Holman Jones, S. (2016). Living bodies of thought: The “critical” in critical autoethnography. Qualitative Inquiry, 22(4), 228–237. Lorimer, H. (2005). Cultural geography: The busyness of being more-than-representational. Progress in human geography, 29(1), 83–94. Milne, E. J., Mitchell, C., & De Lange, N. (Eds.). (2012). Handbook of participatory video. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press. Nichols, B. (2010). Introduction to documentary (2nd ed.). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Pack, S. (2000). Indigenous media then and now: Situating the Navajo film project. Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 17(3), 273–286. Pink, S. (Ed.). (2012). Advances in visual methodology.Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Ltd. Prins, H. E. (1989). American Indians and the ethnocinematic complex: From native participation to production control. Visual Studies, 4(2), 80–90. Rose, G. (2012). Visual methodologies: An introduction to researching with visual materials.Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Ltd. Rouch, J., & Feld, S. (2003). Ciné-ethnography. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Spivak, G. (1990). The post-colonial critic: Interviews, strategies, dialogue. London, UK: Psychology Press. St. Pierre, E. (2019). Post qualitative inquiry in an ontology of immanence. Qualitative Inquiry, 24(9), 728–736. Steyerl, H. (2013). How not to be seen: A fucking didactic education .mov file [video]. Retrieved from https:// www.artforum.com/video/hito-steyerl-how-not-to-be-seen-a-fucking-didactic-educational-mov-fi le-2013-51651 Steyerl, H., & Olivieri, D. (2013). Shattered images and desiring matter: A dialogue between Hito Steyerl and Domitilla Olivieri. In B. Papenburg & M. Zarzycka (Eds.), Carnal aesthetics:Transgressive imagery and feminist politics (pp. 214–225). New York, NY: Palgrave/IB Tauris. Thrift, N. (2008). Non-representational theory: Space/politics/affect. London, UK: Routledge. Tormey, S. (2015). The end of representative politics. London, UK: John Wiley & Sons. Ulmer, J. B. (2018). Composing techniques: Choreographing a postqualitative writing practice. Qualitative Inquiry, 25(1), 3–16. Vannini, P. (Ed.). (2015). Non-representational methodologies: Re-envisioning research. New York, NY: Routledge. Wyatt, J. (2019). Therapy, stand-up, and the gesture of writing: Towards creative-relational inquiry. London, UK: Routledge.

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PART 4

Working with others

Part 4 Introduction The four chapters included in Part Four of the handbook discuss issues pertinent to working together with others.The word “others” is intended to be inclusive of humans and non-humans. The choice of the words “working together with” is also deliberate.There is an old expression that in fictional film the director is god, and in documentary film god is the director.There is a lot of truth in this, if by “god” we mean the sum of the forces and dynamics that a director cannot control. Many of those forces and dynamics, it is easy to see, are social and relational and documentary filmmakers quickly learn that the success of their work depends on learning to work together.Whether or not we collaborate with others, whenever we film we depend on the good will of those who let us film them, and clearly that good will is dependent on what we do as filmmakers to establish and maintain good rapport with them.The four chapters by Wolffram, Shankar, Chalcraft and Hikiji, and Abbott detail specific ways in which we may do that. We begin with Paul Wolffram, whose chapter lays the ethical foundations underpinning all other chapters in this section. Chapter 18 begins with a reminder that most of us find ourselves doing work with people we initially know little about.This,Wolffram argues, demands first and foremost that we build a relationship based on the principle of respect.After the foundations of respect are built, relationships between ethnographic filmmakers and their research participants should proceed on the basis of integrity. Over time, this builds a rapport rooted in mutual trust. Drawing from his own experiences Wolffram provides us with a guide for both ethical and practical considerations. Chapter 19 focuses on participation, reception, consent, and refusal.Also drawing from reflections grounded in his own practice Arjun Shankar asks us an important question: when should we not show footage and when should we not make ethnographic films? And if we do, “what must we do in order to feel comfortable that our ideas of consent may not be embedded in the problematic ideals of our ethnographic pasts?” (Shankar, this book). His narratives are compelling, and full of valuable and transferrable lessons. Shankar’s reflections also bring us far past the considerations all of us need to give to the ethical issues contained in Institutional Review Board application forms by exploring situations when consent turns into a revenge of sorts, a revenge playing out around the un-envisioned consequences of participation. Subsequently, Shankar turns to another dilemma in participatory audio-visual research, that of the illusion of

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the real.This is a dilemma that revolves around the illusion of consent by eliding the issues of circulation and reception. Chapter 19 ends with a discussion on strategies of refusal, a discussion especially valuable for ethnographers committed to collaborative practice. Continuing the thread of collaboration, Chalcraft and Hikiji examine the ethics, aesthetics, and practicalities of collaboration during the process of post-production. They draw their lessons from their own experiences collaborating with Shambuyi Wetu, a Congolese artist living in Brazil.When collaborative production is radicalized—as was the case in their experience—it problematizes the very idea of post-production. Collaborative post-production results in the ethnographic filmmakers, the artists being filmed (subjects of the research), and the editorial team working together with the utmost regard for one another and ultimately resulting in a significant impact on the form, content, and dissemination of a film. Collaborative post-production forces us to consider an often-neglected ethical aspect of ethnographic filmmaking: the ethics of representation right as it plays out in the editing suite. Part 4 ends up with a deeply thought-provoking chapter that will force most of us to reconsider whom, exactly we can film with. Drawing on contemporary debates on more-than-human matters, the ethics and politics of representation, and even—implicitly—flat ontologies Sarah Abbott pushes us to give the same level of ethical consideration to the act of filming with nonhumans as we do to the act of filming with humans.This, she writes, ensures that we enter into care-full relations built on respect and regard to their needs and realities. Plants, rocks, mountains, land, water, and animals—only to mention a few nonhuman Others—demand we end our long-lived disregard for their subjectivity and that we engage in filmic practices that are sensitive to their lives.Abbott writes that there is always a footprint to filmmaking practices, “whether nonhumans are the focus of attention or contributing to the setting” (this book) and asks us to be mindful of how even the simple “act of looking at nonhumans without a camera can be invasive—or, rather, co-constitutive” (this book).

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18 RESPECT, INTEGRITY, TRUST Paul Wolffram

He aha te mea nui o te ao? What is the most important thing in the world? He tangata, he tangata, he tangata It is the people, it is the people, it is the people This well-known New Zealand Māori proverb acts as a reminder of the central and binding component that underpins all ethnographic work. Our task as ethnographic filmmakers requires us to interact with people that we may initially know very little about. Even when we undertake the work with due diligence, preparation, and research, we are likely to find ourselves engaging with individuals or communities with whom we have only a basic understanding of one another. With this in mind the approach should always be one where respect for our interlocutors comes first. Once we have a shared basis of respect, the process of establishing a relationship built on integrity can begin.Then, with time, the ultimate goal is that of establishing genuine and ongoing mutual trust. From a foundation of respect, integrity, and trust an ethnographic film can explore any subject with almost any methodology.The stylistic, narrative, and structural possibilities are equally open and only limited by the filmmaker’s intention and imagination. This chapter provides a guide to the practical and ethical considerations encountered when living and working with people during the production of an ethnographic film.The suggestions presented here are based on current thinking in the academic field and my experiences in the process of making a number of ethnographic films with Pacifica, Māori, and disabilities communities within New Zealand and in the South Pacific. The circumstances, relationships, and aims of every film are as unique as the resulting works.The challenges of dealing with human ethics and the moral considerations in a shifting and dynamic cultural and social context will always require individual consideration and reflection. Ethnographic film inevitably involves engaging in other people’s lives. This can be a violent, disruptive, and disturbing process, or a natural and unassuming process that has minimal negative impact on individuals and a host community.The level of intimacy and engagement required as part of the process of filmmaking can be very high. In some instances the filmmaker(s) may have access to secret, private, or even sacred knowledge and information. Given these extraordinary circumstances it is important that 195

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we consider our ethics, approach, and impact carefully and adjust as the circumstances of the ethnographic engagement develop. Most people who have spent even small amounts of time in the field come to an appreciation of the fact that there is no simple formula by which these principles can be implemented. Karl Heider, among others, has highlighted that “the making of an ethnographic film raises extraordinarily complex ethical questions” (2006, p. 110).While various professional and affiliated organizations such as the American Anthropological Association (AAA) have a Code of Ethics that is based around the central tenet of ethnographers “doing no harm,” there is no presiding code of ethics for ethnographic film (see www.aaanet.org). Heider suggests that even this relatively simple formulation of “doing no harm” becomes problematic “when anthropological research, in advocacy of threatened minorities, tries to expose the actions of the threatening powers and thus is critical of one side of the issue (and that side is the one issuing research visas)” (2006, p. 110). The Society of Visual Anthropology (SVA) has more recently sought to address issues of ethics through round table and forum discussions rather than issuing a set of rules or dictates (for more information see Perry and Marion, 2010). Many of the institutions that support or provide permissions for ethnographic film research require human ethics approval. Ethics approval often includes the creation of information and informed consent documentation to be signed by participants.These documents are most usefully viewed as a process by which the ethnographer can scrutinize her approach to working with her participants. Human ethics processes can also be more cynically viewed as a bureaucratic process employed by institutions to protect themselves.These practices can be understood as institutions using their own legal systems to prevent non-Western communities from protecting their intellectual property and traditional knowledge systems. If informed consent is the ultimate aim of human ethics processes, how can a researcher guarantee that the consent is truly informed? For example, how can an elderly community member in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea possibly know how her interview will be interpreted by an audience in New York? Equally, how could a Mongolian herdsman know that the initiation song he sings will be transmitted through the Internet to be heard by a young girl in France? The issues around ownership and the interpretation of meaning and intent are deeply culturally bound.When we consider these circumstances it is clear that there is no way to guarantee truly informed consent (c.f. Sherman, 2008). It is likely that, as Faye Ginsburg suggests, ethnographic film, has always and will always be a genre that struggles with the conditions of its own privilege (2018, p. 48). Collaboration is often employed as a methodology to establish a greater level of agency for the participants.This approach is now relatively commonplace but it raises problems associated with authorship that are also subject to cultural interpretations. As Kathleen Kuehnast (1992) states, all images made of a culture by a member of another can be perceived as a form of cultural imperialism and act as a kind of reinforcement of a “dominant ideology.” Kuehnast suggests that “visual imperialism is the colonization of the world mind through the use of selective imagery that acts as a representation of the dominant ideology or, as in many instances, a representation of the truth” (1992, p.185). It is also true that the ownership and control of the resulting work is very rarely in the hands of the collaborating participants. The potential subversion of one cultural ideology to another is always in play in any endeavor that requires cross-cultural collaboration. Ethnographic filmmakers have sought to improve their methodologies through collaborative approaches beginning as early as the 1960’s, most famously recognized in the work of Jean Rouch (see Henley, 2010).We have come to understand that film is not a positivist visual representation of the “Other” but as David MacDougall has argued,“it is always a record of the 196

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meeting between the filmmaker and that society” (1998, p. 134). Recent decades have seen the rise of many different and experimental methodologies ranging from observational films and participatory works, to shared authorship and subject-generated ethnographic films, to name just a few. Regardless of the methodologies employed, as Jay Ruby (1995) notes, ethnographic filmmakers cannot escape their moral responsibility toward the people and communities they work with. At the same time, Ruby argues that filmmakers also assume responsibilities toward their viewers; they feel obliged to identify some of their strategies of representation through more referential and reflexive textual constructions of the “Other” (Ruby, 1980, p.153). All of the complexities presented here suggest the difficult and often fraught nature of ethnographic filmmaking. There is no clearly defined path by which any filmmaker can navigate easily through this tangle of complexities.With these intricacies in mind, I suggest that ethnographic filmmakers should be guided by a pervasive set of values. These values can provide a constant compass bearing, they can underlie all interactions, and inform the artistic choices of a project.The idea of approaching the task from the perspective of values return us to the point made at the outset, “he tangata—the people.” This is an important reminder that human life is dialogically constructed, in other words we develop and define ourselves in relation to others. As Taylor implies, we construct our moral identities through social communities (Taylor, 1992). Anthropology and ethnographic engagement has and continues to be, as we have seen above, accused of cultural imperialism, cast as a method of colonization, and a tool for exerting power and control over the “Other” (Ruby, 1991 p. 58).These accusations may at times be justified and should be acknowledged as part of the inherent and sometimes hidden structures underlying ethnographic practices. However, ethnographic film practice and the resulting works can also, more charitably, be perceived as a practice born of curiosity and respect. It is not too far-fetched to claim that ethnography can and should be founded on genuine curiosity, compassion, and intellectual wonder. When performed in a respectful way and as part of a deeply engaged practice that treats other knowledge systems and worldviews as equal to the researcher’s own, ethnographic filmmaking can be a powerful tool for understanding fellow human beings and their cultural practices.What is required then is an approach that places people at the center of the project. From conception, to pre-production, through the often multiple production stages, to the post-production, and distribution of the resulting works a “people-centred” approach should underpin all interactions.

The beginnings: respect Everything begins, I suggest, with the ethnographic filmmaker embracing their own ignorance. As mentioned, there will always be understandings and contextual specificities that can only be comprehended through long-term cohabitation.This is why long-term fieldwork persists as the dominant ethnographic methodology of ethnographic filmmaking. A key aspect of the process of establishing respect is in the ability of the filmmaker to make it clear to his hosts that he is there to learn. In many ethnographic field settings the relationship between the ethnographer/ filmmaker and her host community has been established by assumptions that pre-exist in that context. Depending on the particular location, for example, communities that have previously suffered colonial rule, war, foreign intervention, or administration by a foreign country, will have an established set of assumptions about what you are and how you operate. Equally, communities who are the recipients of aid programs, or who simply have a different skin color to that of the researcher will be sensitive to the unspoken dynamics between “us” and “them.” These circumstances contribute to a cultural geography that is specific to place and time.There is no way to avoid these cultural and political contexts but the researcher is able, over time, to alter the 197

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foundational assumptions of these relationships. One way of doing this is to acknowledge, early on in the fieldwork process, that you are seeking to learn from them. Within the first weeks of arriving in Southern New Ireland, Papua New Guinea for my first period of fieldwork I noted a number of assumptions about who and what I was. One of the most confronting was the use of the local term “masta,” which translates as “white man” in Tok Pisin.The word has its origins in the English word “master” and for me it was a constant reminder of the colonial history of the region.To most New Irelanders “masta” simply denotes a person of European heritage and does not come with any political undertone. During those early months I was often accompanied around the village by my host family’s youngest child, a 5-year-old boy. As we walked together he would point things out to me and ask questions, “Masta that is where my uncle lives,”“masta, look at this tree,”“masta why is your hair like that of a chicken?” After weeks of this I reminded him that I have a name, and that he can call me Paul rather than “masta.” He considered this for a while and eventually responded “But why? You are a masta.” Assumptions about what I was and what I could and could not do constantly accompanied my daily interactions. Small transistor radios were brought to me for repair and I was sought out for medical services.There was also confusion and good-natured ridicule at my lack of skill in the garden, ineptitude with a machete, and frequent frustration with how badly I pronounced words. I was forced to become comfortable with being perceived as “basically useless” at most important daily activities.These early stages of fieldwork were frequently challenging. It was a demoralizing experience being perceived by my hosts as having little value. At the same time I had also begun the process of transforming from a “masta” into a human being, not an idea or set of cultural assumptions but a real person, like the people I was engaging with, only with much poorer machete skills.These experiences are common to many fieldworkers and can be understood as a positive reduction of status. Through our deficits of knowledge and lack of “street smarts” we come to be seen more as people and less as types, more human and less like a “masta.” I eventually did acquire some knowledge and over several months I was able to prove that I could learn songs, dances, and stories. My host community also came to see and appreciate that my interests were not fleeting or superficial. My gradual acceptance and integration into the communities I was living with came home to me quite profoundly one day when I performed in a dance event.After completing the performance I walked past a young mother with a toddler in her arms.The child stared at me wide-eyed in fear and the mother comforted the child by telling her “don’t be afraid he’s not a white man but a ‘Small Bird’ like you and me” (see Wolffram, 2006).The young woman identified me as a “Small Bird” clan member because of my participation in the particular dance troupe. This felt like a moment of acceptance. I was perceived as having a place in the community and a role within the society.This instance acted as a catalyst for me. It was the moment where I gained some confidence in my status and membership of a clan.With my growing place in the community and developing identity I was able to begin to explore the possibilities of telling stories together. In the weeks that followed I approached my adopted family members and proposed that we use the camera to tell a story. By this time, some nine months into my fieldwork period, I had developed enough familiarity among my host community to make the proposal possible.This familiarity was not just with me but also my recording equipment and paraphernalia. I had been cautious with how I went about introducing the tools of filmmaking. I spent several weeks introducing myself before I first pulled out an audio recorder. It was almost three months before I started using the video camera.When I did begin to use it, the camera attracted quite a bit of attention and I spent time showing people what it was and how it worked.This was a deliberate process of demystifying the tools.At times I found this strategy effective as a way 198

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of explaining my potentially incomprehensible actions, behaviors that might have been considered rude or strange.At other times I could see that explanations were entirely unnecessary and my collaborator was happy enough to simply wait while I did my thing. Ultimately, I came to appreciate that all engagements with equipment and recording devices were potentially distracting so I developed processes to minimize my interactions with the recording tools. Through experience I was able to accurately estimate optimal mic placements, fields of view, battery operation times, and the frame size required to accommodate potential movement of a subject during interviews.All with the aim of minimizing distracting interactions with equipment. The processes of relationship building described here, feed directly into our collaboration on the film Stori Tumbuna–Ancestors’ Tales (2011). By the time we started to discuss the possibility of telling a story together I had enough cultural, linguistic, and social fluency to be able to comprehend and appreciate the ideas that were offered to me. As the filming process went on in stages over several months my understandings developed further. What I initially imagined would be a short dramatic skit, grew into a feature length film that took an additional ten years to realize onto screen. Like any ethnographic endeavor, the film morphed, changed, and developed as we proceeded. I eventually came to appreciate the epistemological questions that the film raised and to understand on a much deeper level the Indigenous knowledge systems that inform the local ethos. The learning experiences and collaboration described here were only made possible via engagement with the community on their own terms and timeframe. This process not only developed my respect for my collaborators’ world and understandings, but it also eventually generated respect for my areas of knowledge and skill among my host community.

Ongoing relationships: integrity During the final few months of my first period of fieldwork I talked with many of my collaborators about returning within the next two years. People were polite and encouraging but reserved. I later came to appreciate that my hosts had heard promises like this in the past and had little expectation of these promises eventuating.A year and a half later when I did return for a further eight months the reception to me was overwhelming. People expressed surprise and delight and while I repeatedly pointed out that I had always promised to return, I came to see that my hosts placed little stock in what is said and much more emphasis on how people behave. Partly because of the foundational knowledge I had already established, and as a result of the rapport I had built as a consequence of my return, the second period of fieldwork proved to be an incredible period of learning. My interactions with informants, adopted family, and other collaborators were characterized by a feeling of being welcomed as an old friend. I have continued to maintain contact with my host communities in Southern New Ireland, returning many times. Not all ethnographic film productions have the luxury of such long periods in the field or ongoing commitment.While there is little substitute for long-term engagement, the establishment and demonstration of ongoing commitment does not necessarily have to take place over quite such a long period.There are other methods that are potentially effective in establishing a people-centred ethnographic process. These alternative approaches include collaboration with ethnographers who have already developed a strong relationship with a community or establishing a relationship with a key individual and cultural “insider” who is able to act as a liaison.1 Working with other anthropologists or ethnographers can be a productive experience that allows for the combination of different skill sets.The relationships, rapport, and integrity developed between the host community and the researcher can open doors and enable access for the filmmaker that would otherwise take months, if not years, to establish.The ethical responsibility of 199

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the filmmaker in such circumstances is consequently more complex.The filmmaker is responsible to the collaborating anthropologist as well as to the participants. In most cases there will be no conflict, but it is possible that circumstances will arise in which the collaborators disagree with stylistic approaches or the use of certain images. Filmmakers are at times perceived as emphasizing sensationalism, exoticism, or even deliberate misrepresentations in service to dramatic tension. It has even been suggested that the “conventions of dramatic tension are fundamentally at odds with making ethically sound ethnographic films” (Henegardner, 2009, p. 11).While I do not necessarily agree with this position, it is important to remain alert to the fact that ethnographic film, as Worth has articulated, is not only a representation of reality but also a very constructed interpretation of another culture through the lens of the filmmaker’s culture (Worth, 1972). Anthropologists who usually work in more traditional text-based media can struggle with the way in which moving images work as tools for communication of research-based understandings. Most films, even feature ethnographic films, are only able to convey specific aspects of research findings.While film can be very effective at providing both details and elements of a broader environment, it is not particularly effective as a vehicle for statistics or complex data. Ethnographic film can provide an intimate experience that generates an empathic response and can enable a type of access, a feeling of unmediated directness that is often missing from textual descriptions and written accounts. However, this perceived “directness” often comes at a cost of detail. A film must, in most instances (and with the possible exception of interactive documentaries), focus on one aspect and one way of telling the story. The economic realities that surround ethnographic filmmakers are also a factor that mean we are potentially more susceptible to non-ethical behavior due to our collaboration with nonanthropological and non-academic institutions. Because our equipment is more expensive than those of our colleagues who produce ethnographic writing, external pressures to make our films commercially viable may come to bear.As Kuehnast has pointed out, these pressures may result in an “unconscious acquiescence to the demands of the communications industries” (1992, p. 187). Collaboration with cultural insiders who are able to act as liaisons, guides, and potentially even as co-producers is another means of advancing rapport with communities and proving a commitment to act with integrity.These types of collaborations can lead filmmakers to reconceive their ideas about control over projects and authorship in ways that are potentially healthy and eye opening. Ethically, difficulties can be encountered around internal community politics and the deliberate obscuring of certain aspects that collaborators do not want to reveal. The danger presented here is one of being “curated,” or managed by your collaborators. All these approaches to managing and establishing integrity rely on the foundation of respectful relations and a desire to present accurately and sensitively the ethnographic circumstances. Communication between parties and a willingness to reflect, absorb, and challenge assumptions as the work progresses, can make the process particularly fruitful.When managed well the pressures, expectations, and economic realities of the collaboration can be mitigated through careful engagement.

A shared goal: trust Trust, like the other elements involved in establishing a “people-centred” ethnographic film practice, requires ongoing commitment with interlocutors. Informed consent, as discussed, is never a simple matter of signing a form. To achieve something that actually resembles real informed consent requires ongoing communication which continues into the post-production process and beyond. A discussion about motivations between the filmmaker(s) and the collaborating participants can help.What is it that motivates and drives the participants to be involved in 200

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the filmmaking process? Exploring these questions together can help to reveal potential conflicts but also shared goals. Motivations can vary widely for collaborators and filmmakers but these diverse goals are not necessarily in conflict with one another. People participate in ethnographic films for a variety of reasons: curiosity, interest, or perhaps because there is a feeling that it’s important that the story is shared, because it might help to deliver change, or because of the “message” of the film (see Wolffram, 2018, p. 272). Exploring motivations can uncover common goals and potential disputes, and is integral to the establishment of trust. Returning to a field site to screen the film is essential to the development of trust relationships. I have been fortunate to be able to screen all of my projects prior to the final “lock off.” Some filmmakers work with participants in the editing process or have multiple “pre-screening” events.The circumstances and budget may allow for a variety of different approaches. A minimum and essential part of the process should be a commitment to your “first audience:” those collaborators/participants who have equal investment and ownership of the film.These screenings can be insightful and valuable for a sense of shared ownership of the film. Participants see these screenings as a way to raise issues with the resulting work, provide approval, or advocate for additions and changes. Observing an audience watch a film for the first time is often useful to gain immediate emotional insight into how the film works or does not work. Discussions following the screening are useful to gage immediate feedback. Conversations with individuals or small groups a few days after the screening can raise more reflective responses. Considering the impact of the work is also the responsibility of the filmmaker and worthy of discussion with the film’s participants. In this respect, the filmmaker may be in a much better position than her collaborators to consider the potential positive and negative impacts that the film might have on the community or individuals involved, as well as those who may have chosen not to engage in the filming process. Things to consider here include will the interest generated by the film be of benefit to interlocutors? What negative impacts may arise? Can these impacts be managed? What effects, both positive and negative, might the film have on those who chose to participate and those who might be collaterally affected? Not all outcomes will be predictable but such questions do require serious consideration. One must also consider the questions of benefits and remuneration around the film. What becomes of any profit that may eventuate from the screenings, distribution, or sales? Ethnographic film is not a particularly lucrative endeavor and there may need to be some management of expectations around the potential of the film to generate revenue. The arrangements around payments, gifts, group or individual compensation, and the division of profits from the resulting work cannot be comprehensively detailed in the space here.These can be as varied as the people we work with and needs to take into account indigenous concepts of payment, reciprocating, and gifting. Such arrangements should be discussed early in the process of collaboration and expectations about the amounts carefully managed. Benefits can also be measured in ways not strictly associated with remuneration. The opportunity to travel and promote the work, or to benefit from the publicity and profile that might be generated, are also worth raising.Whatever the process decided upon, managing expectations and notions of “fairness” in the eyes of different parties involved is key to the ability of the ethnographer to establish trust.

He tangata It is fitting to end by considering the other group of people with whom ethnographic film engages: the audience.What are our obligations to audiences and how do we treat them with equal respect, integrity, and trust? The key to confronting ethical challenges, as Koehler has pointed out, is to determine where one’s obligations lie (2012, p. 58).Those obligations are often understood to be 201

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split between the subjects of the film and the wider audience. Many writers and critics are didactic about what techniques, methodologies, and styles should and should not be used in ethnographic films.These dictates have led audiences to expect certain things from ethnographic film including conforming to certain stylistic conventions.This adoption and reliance on convention may not be ethically responsible to the audience. Do ethnographic filmmakers have an obligation to innovate and develop their medium to explore possibilities of communication? Ruby, MacDougall, Hocking and Heider, to name only a few of the seminal writers in the field, have tried to delineate what an ethnographic film is and is not.They have variously sought to define the field through principles (MacDougall, 2006, p. 220–225; Ruby, 2000), production techniques (Hocking, 1995), or the credentials of the filmmakers (Heider, 2006, p. 112).These definitions and debates have usefully highlighted questions about ethnographic film’s contribution to anthropology. My own approach to what does and does not constitute an ethnographic film focuses more on the relationship between the filmmakers and the participants. Is the relationship ethnographic? That is to say is it founded on respect, integrity, and trust as outlined here? Is the filmmaker(s) trying to portray someone else’s understandings of their lifeworld or their own understanding of another’s lifeworld, as comprehended through ethnographic engagement? If the answer to any of these questions is yes, then there is no technique, approach, methodology, or stylistic approach that holds more validity than any other. There is, however, always the question of authenticity as experienced by the audience. Authenticity can be established with an audience through a commitment by the ethnographer to present sympathetically, accurately, and truthfully. Western audiences, in particularly, are well practiced at gauging the validity or “truth” of what is presented to them on screen. Ethnographic filmmakers owe a duty to their audience to present without romanticizing or portraying what has been called the “beautiful lie” of Indigenous people living in perfect harmony with the natural environment (Ruutel, 2009, p. 208). Equally, it would be unethical to lie to the audience either directly through the misrepresentations of facts or through contextual misplacement, like the use of a song in an inappropriate context. As mentioned, I am reluctant to place hard and fast rules around “performance to camera,” re-enactments, artistic portrayals, or even ideological constructions, as long as filmmaking approaches are in line with a commitment to the principles outlined here. I go further to suggest that as ethnographic filmmakers we should be constantly challenging ourselves and our audience to explore the potential of different narrative structures, stylistic approaches, and production and post-production techniques. There is also an ethically compelling case for making the position and place of the filmmaker reflexively present. I have taken some time in this chapter to provide accounts from my own filmmaking experiences because they help to illustrate the development of a carefully established respectful relationship with my collaborators. These accounts and the way I have introduced myself and my work emulate some of the narrative devices that I employ in filmmaking. Presenting authenticity to the viewer, or reader, is important for establishing trust with both the people you are working with and the audience you hope to reach. As Toril Jenssen argues, authenticity is a rule of thumb for visual media communication,“one has to tell about one’s own real experiences, or the experiences of others, but in a controlled and apparently genuine manner” (2009, pp. 135–136). Is it ethical to talk about the “Other” without articulating the process through which you acquired the knowledge? This is especially important in an academic field where the “instrument of measurement” is the ethnographer and where “the majority of information and knowledge absorbed is predicated on the relationship between the ethnographer and their interlocutors” (Wolffram, 2013, p. 209). Jenssen also notes that articulations of identity have to be conscious of the risk of developing into narcissism (2009, p. 137). An old adage about the subjects of ethnography being infinitely more fascinating than the ethnographer comes to mind. 202

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I hope that the values of respect, integrity, and trust presented here are useful ways to approach and navigate the potentially paralyzing tangle of complexities that confront us as filmmakers entering the field. Our ability to balance a deep consideration of others with a willingness to explore and extend the practice of ethnographic film is what will keep the discipline worthwhile, engaging, and challenging.

Note 1 It is also possible, that experience can accelerate an ethnographic practice and allow for shorter more intense periods of filming and fieldwork.

References Ginsburg, F. (2018). Decolonizing documentary on-screen and off: Sensory ethnography and the aesthetics of accountability. Film Quarterly, 72(1), 39–49. Heider, K. G. (2006). Ethnographic film (revised ed.).Arlington,TX: University of Texas Press. Henley, P. (2010). The adventures of the real: Jean Rouch and the craft of ethnographic cinema. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Hinegardner, L. (2009). Engaging ethnographic film: The ethics of constructing dramatic tension. Anthropology News, 50(4), 11–12. Hockings, P. (1995). Principles of visual anthropology. Berlin,Walter de Gruyter & Co. Jenssen,T. (2009). Behind the eye: Reflexive methods in culture studies, ethnographic film, and visual media. Florence: Routledge. Koehler, D. (2012). Documentary and ethnography: Exploring ethical fieldwork models. The Elon Journal of Undergraduate Research in Communications, 3(1). Retrieved from https://www.scribd.com/document /176742263/Koehler-Documentary, 53-60. Kuehnast, K. (1992).Visual imperialism and the export of prejudice. An exploration of ethnographic film. In P. Crawford & D.Turton (Eds.), Film as ethnography. Manchester: Manchester University Press.bookMacDougal, D. (1998).Transcultural Cinema. Princeton, NJ: Princton University Press. MacDougall, D. (2006). The corporeal image film, ethnography, and the senses. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Perry, S., & Marion, J. S. (2010). State of the ethics in visual anthropology. Visual Anthropology Review, 26(2), 96–104. Ruby, J. (1980). Exposing yourself: Reflexivity, anthropology and film. Semiotica, 30(1–2), 153–179. Ruby, J. (1991). Speaking for, speaking about, speaking with, or speaking alongside — An anthropological and documentary dilemma. Visual Anthropology Review, 7(2), 50–67. Ruby, J. (1995). The moral burden of authorship in ethnographic film. Visual Anthropology Review, 11(2), 77–82. Ruby, J. (2000). Picturing culture: Explorations of film and anthropology. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Ruutel, I. (2009).Truth and ethics in visual anthropology. Media & folklore. Contemporary folklore, IV, 205–215. Sherman, S. R. (2008). Who owns culture and who decides?: Ethics, film methodology, and intangible cultural heritage protection. Western folklore, 67(2/3), 223–236. Taylor, C. (1992). The ethics of authenticity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wolffram, P. (2006). “He’s not a white man, he’s a small bird like you and me”: Learning to dance and becoming human in Southern New Ireland. Yearbook for Traditional Music, 38, 109–132. Wolffram, P. (2011). Stori tumbuna ancestors’ tales. Wellington, New Zealand: Handmade Productions Aotearoa. Wolffram, P. (2013). Pakeha, palagi, whiteskin: Reflections on ethnographic socialisation and the self. The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, 14(3), 207–220. Wolffram, P. (2018). Dreaming a narrative and conjuring an image: Collaborative filmmaking with people and spirits in Melanesia. Visual Anthropology, 31(3), 268–291. Worth, S. (1972). Through Navajo eyes: An exploration in film communication and anthropology. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

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19 PARTICIPATION, RECEPTION, CONSENT, AND REFUSAL Arjun Shankar

When should we not show footage and when should we not make ethnographic films (Durington, et al, 2017)? And if we do, what must we do in order to feel comfortable that our ideas of consent may not be embedded in the problematic ideals of our anthropological pasts. In 2014, I initiated a participatory photography and film project in Karnataka, India with a group of youth whom I had met during my fieldwork in the village of Advisandra.1 Advisandra, like much of the areas to the south of Bangalore city, was experiencing immeasurable changes associated with Bangalore’s massive urbanization. Just 40 kilometers south of the city,Advisandra was slowly becoming interwoven into the fabric of agricultural decimation and urban sprawl, new roads drawing connections between people, jobs, and ideas that were dramatically changing the life possibilities and aspirations of those in the village. As economic change exacerbates rural precarity, rural youth in communities like Adavisandra continue to be the focus of much image-making, which draws on colonial characterizations of the rural as primitive, backwards, and static and presents them as helpless, suffering subjects who are in need of help by outsiders who have the means and skills to lift them out of their sorry states. Images and films of rural youth, in this context, are seen as unmediated and objective glimpses into their realities, proof that they are just as helpless as those outside the village imagine and reifying discourses regarding their lack of agency and self-driven possibility (Shankar, 2014). When I started my participatory photography project, I was eager to work with youth to “see” their changing lives differently. Over the course of a year, I worked with students on this project, distributing five handheld digital cameras and two H2 Zoom audio recorders to 15 youth in one ninth standard classroom in the village, learning together about photography, film, visuality, and their homes and lives. We produced thousands of photographs—of trees, windows, bicycles, silk cocoons, schools, TV screens, ephemeral interactions—each of which were driven by my students’ playful curiosity. Sometimes they would take hundreds of shots of the same objects, trying to see if they might produce a different kind of image—with different lighting, from different angles, in hyperreal colors—that might, during viewing, reveal their technical and creative skill through the way they remade “everyday” objects into objects of curiosity. I, for example, have over one hundred shots of the sun, rising, setting, hidden behind trees, in red, yellow, morning, midday, and night, framed and re-framed endlessly to capture just a bit of something that seemed to elude each attempt at representation. 204

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Each week, we would gather together as a group and look through their shots, remarking on what they were seeing and why they had chosen the shots they had taken. Most of the time, I would not yet have seen the footage, and so I would try to quickly scroll through images and short film clips until I stopped at one I thought would be interesting only to have them protest, exclaiming that I had missed their favorite shots and the ones they felt we ought to ascribe the most value to. These sessions were a struggle for me, especially at the beginning, when I insisted that we analyze shots that I found ethnographically useful: shots which seemed to strike at the heart of the puzzles I was trying to solve as a researcher (Shankar, 2019).Yet, over time, I came to rely on my students’ insights to begin to listen to their images (Campt, 2017), re-working what I saw as valuable and worthy of attention based on their refusal to follow my gaze or my lead. My method was, at least at one level, to maintain a rigorous attention to the ethics of participation and to heed the advice of visual anthropologists like Karen Nakamura (2008) who warn against giving cameras to our informants without recognizing how our projects might re-inscribe the politics of labor that accompany any attempt to produce images and films with those who are already at the margins of visual production. For the most part, while I was doing my fieldwork, I felt secure in the sincere attention to the participatory ethics of our pursuit, having changed and grown in the process of mutual learning we undertook together (Friere, 2001). Based on our collective viewing sessions, we had chosen 30 photographs that we would show together as part of a photo exhibition at their school and which we would show again at a university in Bangalore. After these two exhibitions we hung all these photographs in the various classrooms of their school and printed out another five hundred photographs which children and their families took home with them. I left all of the equipment I had brought with me behind so that I might avoid the possibility that our learning might be truncated, ephemeral, and static, making sure that these youth could continue photographing after I left for Philadelphia, where I was completing my doctoral work. When I left my participants, I was eager to share the work we had done.And I started down that road, showing many of the photographs that we had taken with colleagues and friends in the United States. I also began the work of creating an “essay film” about Adavisandra using the audio recordings, images, and films they had taken. But then something strange happened. Ever so slowly my enthusiasm waned, and I began to be more and more resistant to showing any of my participants’ footage. A kind of “iconophobia” took over and I became ever-more anxious about sharing the visual work that had made my time in the field so full of life (Castings-Taylor, 1996; Mitchell, 1997). Lucien Castings-Taylor famously critiqued the iconophobic tendencies of the anthropologist, concluding that filmmaking, and the observational form in particular, always spills beyond a filmmaker’s control, and, in fact, allows for fruitful interpretative possibilities that textual analyses may not because it offers “thick depictions” (1996, p. 86). And yet, it is precisely this visual excess that creates all this iconophobia. Building on Castings-Taylor’s argument, Mitchell (1997) describes the emotional grip that images have when he writes,“we might say that iconophobia and iconophilia make sense primarily to people who think that other people think that images are alive. The life of images is not private or individual matter. It is a social life” (p. 93). What Mitchell is arguing and what gripped me with iconophobia was precisely the problematics that come with visual circulations, in understanding that other people give life to images in ways that are uncontrolled. I could not help but feel that the footage which I was showing was not doing the same work anymore as it started to travel further and further away from those moments of direct discussion and interaction in which they were produced. During each ensuing viewing they felt more like “stand-ins” for the youth who made them, both unmediated glimpses into 205

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their everyday that also spilled forth with “attenuated meanings” (Spillers in Campt, 2017 p. 16) each time I showed them anew. It was not that the youth whom I worked with had not given consent. In fact, all of the images and footage that I was showing were explicitly agreed upon by all of us for audiences beyond Adavisandra. Instead, what seemed to grip me was a fear regarding their reception and the way that these images might actually live on in forms that might reproduce the worst stereotypes of rural youth in India, especially when consumed by visual anthropologists who, like myself, are seemingly preternaturally predisposed to trying to find the authentic and culturally bound ways of seeing those who live far away from the normative visual imaginary of western Eurocentricity (see Pinney, 1997). Yet, at another level, time also seemed to diminish the consent which my youth participants had given.Yes, they had enthusiastically encouraged me to show their footage to my colleagues and, yes, it was possible to get them on the phone to talk about what was happening in the United States, but as they aged from their youthful 14 to 18, then 20, becoming young adults whose worldviews might have changed drastically during our time apart, it felt more and more like I was forcing these youth to stay stuck in that moment when these images had been produced and, as such, that all that participatory verve reached its hard limit as time did the work of bringing the past into the present as if it were the present.To what extent did “fixing” these youth in time actually produce meanings that would become the fodder for new forms of epistemic violence? This slow erosion of confidence in my participatory approach to visual research is, for me, one version of what Audra Simpson (2016, p. 330) might call “the revenge of consent.” For Simpson, consent’s revenge is our participants’ response to a one-hundred year attempt by ethnographers to “thickly describe,” and therefore to render transparent, ethnographic Others: the apparently uncivilized, tribal, savage, primitive, backwards people who would be documented as they drifted into the past.These tightly bound narratives of who they were and what they “meant,” however, were predicated on the assumption of consent i.e., that the ethnographer’s documenting of these people had been agreed to by those who were being photographed and filmed. And yet, in the twenty-first century, visual anthropologists recognize this version of consent as an illusion predicated on the very fact that those whom anthropologists were working with could not speak back, and we have had to find new methods by which to produce a sincerer form of consent. In the rest of this article, I explore a few theoretical vectors upon which consent’s revenge played out and the questions of participation that they have brought about as I have continued to reckon with the footage I collected while in the field. Specifically, I will begin by positioning my work within the continued discourses in visual anthropology on participation, reception, and pleasure, telling a story about one of my re-presentations of student photography to showcase the kinds of dilemmas that we encounter when our work circulates beyond the distance between us and our participants. I will then turn to another dilemma in participatory visual research, that of the illusion of the real, which seems to provide the additional illusion of consent by eliding the issues of circulation and reception that might make for a more ethical consideration of participatory material. I conclude by discussing the strategies of refusal which I foreground in current re-presentations of participatory material that may provide a fruitful avenue for visual anthropologists and ethnographic filmmakers dedicated to collaborative, ethical praxis.

Participation, reception, and the problem of pleasure Anthropologists, and visual anthropologists in particular, have had a long and harried history with the epistemic violence that our visual productions have facilitated (Hochman, 2014; Rony, 1996). Since its beginnings in colonialist racist imagery, anthropology has struggled with the 206

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problematics of representation, especially given that black and brown Others have been consistently turned into “unmediated referents” that simultaneously erased their subjectivities and became stand-ins for entire racial groups (Rony, 1996, p. 62). Over the course of the past hundred years since, much work has sought to re-frame visual ethnographic productions, focusing attention on how to change the power relationships between anthropologists and their subjects, challenging Eurocentric notions of visual quality (Pinney, 1997), finding new methods by which to engage with participants (Gubrium, Harper, and Otanez, 2015), seeking to develop methods of “shared anthropology” (Rouch, 2003), reckoning with the visual regimes that mediate our entrance into the field (Shankar, 2016), and recognizing that our participants might be challenging our visual productions with their own digital creations (Dattatreyan, 2015).Within this burgeoning field, participatory methodologies have grown, driven by a persistent drive to find ever-more ethical methods by which to provide our participants a “modicum of control over the stories that circulate” (Bowles, 2017, p. 108). Yet, despite all of these attempts at challenging the inherent power asymmetries and epistemic violence attached to visual production, anthropologists continue to find the ideal of participation an aspiration that falls just beyond our grasps. Participatory methods have been fraught, seen by many as a new tyranny that provides the optic of ethical praxis while doing very little to subvert the relations between those who have power and those who do not (Strohm, 2012). At each stage, we seem to return to the fact that consent and an idealized participation is simply beyond our reach. Part of the reason, I want to argue, that our ideals for participatory research methods remain unattainable is because of our inability to fully reckon with the issue of reception, especially as images circulate much longer distances in a digital age.While critical media studies scholars have consistently articulated the problematic politics of racially and gendered “ways of seeing” (Berger, 1972; Hall, 1980; Mirzoeff, 2011), anthropologists have had a much harder time theorizing and enacting methods that foreground the problematics of how audiences view the images we bring back from the field (Martinez, 1992). This has partly been because studying the effects of reception empirically, and with systematicity, is not easy: how, for example, do we determine what those who watch our films or gaze at our photographs are taking from them? What biases do our audiences bring to our footage? How much can we predict the context we must give based on who is viewing? But, for me, the problem of participation and reception congealed sometime in 2017, while showing some of my youth footage at an art exhibition just outside of Austin,Texas.The exhibition was part of a new initiative to develop the idea of the anthropological “photo-essay”: a series of images (with minimal text), which might tell a story of anthropological fieldwork while providing insights not already tethered to the written word.Ten anthropologists and photographers came together to show work which was punctuated by a gallery “crit-walk,” during which audience members—a mix of photographers, anthropologists, and curious people from the area—could walk with the artists, hear the artists speak about the work, and ask questions about each project. I had chosen to present 20 images which my students had selected for public showing, images which, as mentioned above, were based on their own curiosity and aesthetic sensibility. The images ranged from landscapes, to photographs of colorful objects—suns, trees, bicycles, kites— to shots of their homes. I purposely withheld several images of my students themselves, feeling, even while putting together the exhibition, that such presentation would be unethical given that those who were depicted would not be present during viewing. Along with the presentation, I included a short half-page caption that explained the project and its political objectives and left the rest open to interpretation by the audience. 207

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Over the course of the day, individuals who saw my students’ images were sometimes perplexed and sometimes mesmerized by the students’ visual productions. Many were impressed, commenting on those which they liked and enjoying the consumption of my participants’ creativity. But as I watched people looking and interacting with these images I became gripped with nerves. I wasn’t sure I wanted people to get pleasure out of these images.As they expressed pleasure, were they actually obscuring the political project which the images were a part of? And, were they expressing pleasure because of particular “attenuated meanings” they were associating with those who were taking these photographs? The “problem of pleasure” has been well documented in visual research, especially when focused on black and brown Others. Poole (1997), for example, writes, “the particular ways in which we experience pleasure of the visual, however, are both culturally and historically specific” (p. 17). In Poole’s discussion, the violent power of colonial pleasure, what she refers to in Said’s terms as “the pleasure of empire,” becomes embedded in the imagination of imperial subjects, circumscribing both how the powerful can be curious and how the marginal became the objects of curiosity. Pleasure is, in other words, deeply political, shaped by our positions within systems of intersectional power. Of course, the problem of pleasure is less about whether or not people should feel pleasure or not, and much more about questions of when, how, and why they get pleasure and, of course, who should be experiencing such pleasures. This became evident during my chat with audience members during the crit-walk. I told the story of how these photographs came to be and the stories behind them, and as I did so, many in the audience became far more engaged with the aesthetics of these photographs than they had before. One of my colleagues summed up what was happening in the crowd incredibly well. He told me as a way to make sense of his process:“you know, when I first looked at these photographs they felt generic to me. Like, we have all seen a photograph of the sun. But like, when you tell these stories, these photographs change, I see them differently.They’re beautiful.” Now, on its surface, my colleague’s words seem rather innocuous and heartfelt. However, when I reflect upon his statement, I think it reveals much about how these images by these youth were positioned within his ways of seeing. First, it suggested that who had created these photographs, the context of these youths lives as rural, as impoverished, as challenging the regimes of value which diminished their creative possibility, all influenced whether the viewer could see these images as aesthetically beautiful and valuable.This, in turn, seemed to de-construct the very premise of the project I had undertaken: if my participants could not be seen as generating valuable images without their stories being placed within the frame, then how different was my project than any of the other do-gooder humanitarians who sought to “help” those in village communities like my participants by placing an excess focus on their suffering and/or destitution? I worried that these images became fetishized commodities as they circulated and were consumed, emblematic of counter-visual cultures that still fell into the trap of “value,” in which images by rural children were hypervalued only because of the excess value that has been placed historically on images of impoverished children as, for example, justification for humanitarian and development interventions (Manzo, 2008; Shankar, 2014).That is to say, image-making practices premised on resistance felt like just another capitalist dupe, another means to commodify the same bodies who have been traditionally the object of fetishistic curiosity even if those bodies were not seen within the frame. Second, my colleague was also making explicit his own aesthetic ideology about what a “quality” image was. For those who have become deeply enmeshed in theories of visuality and in working through the practice of making, we are inevitably inundated with regimes of visual quality that are, for better or for worse, deeply embedded in our training in contexts which cannot help but be overdetermined by the Eurocentric and classed visual regimes, and indeed, the 208

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visual economies (Poole, 1997) that facilitate the movement of very particular kinds of images, perfectly framed, shot with the highest quality equipment, and taken by those who are recognized as “expert” artists. Seeing a shot of the “sun” in that context, is inevitably linked to these visual regimes, which make it nearly impossible to see images like those created by my participants as valuable on their aesthetic merit if they have not been legitimated by an expert. Indeed, what my colleague was hinting at was that it was my mediation as expert which produced the images’ value. When I told the story of fieldwork and gave those contextual clues about how much thought had gone into the image-making and decision-making process, the images seemed to spring to life, taking on added weight based on my explanations as an ethnographic mediamaker with the discursive tools to make that which was unpleasurable suddenly pleasurable. Of course, this particular problem of pleasure is only further exacerbated when we think about ethnographic film. On the one hand, film’s claim to movement—frames that stack upon one another in order to produce temporal and spatial connection seems to challenge the kinds of static framing of the photograph that allow for misrecognitions of pleasure.We want to believe that the problem of pleasure might be solved if the film camera reveals more, provides more context, and subverts our expected understandings by producing a counter-visual narrative through movement on screen. And yet, the problem of film is that its reliance on movement within the frame actually produces another problem which might only exacerbate the problem of pleasure: that is, the now all too well-known problem of film’s illusion of re-presenting “reality.”

Objectivity is still romantic, and the politics of refusal The idea that the camera has been romanticized as the means to objectivity is not new. Galison (2000), for example, historicizes this phenomenon, showing how technical innovations in the camera were attempts at pushing closer to seeing a social world more clearly and more objectively. This belief that film and ethnographic film as mimicking “reality” and/or experience is part of the Faustian pact generated by the earliest ethnographic films, such as Nanook of the North or even earlier productions such as the Lumiere Brother’s earliest films, which were premised on the pretense that viewers were seeing reality in motion and were, in fact, quite fearful of this strange new magic (Grimshaw, 2001). We see this tendency continue into the present in, for example, the sensory ethnographic turn, which re-produces the spectacular voyeurism of observational cinema in its attempt to capture an “experience” of “being there” using 4K cameras and capturing longshots that are intended to open the space that comes with feeling inside the action. But such visual aspirations, whether explicitly or implicitly, claim the status of the “unmarked” and therefore reinforce the problematic power of the ethnographic observer.And when I begin to explore this problematic of objectivity in ethnographic film, I return again and again to Minh-ha’s Re-Assemblage, a work which does its best to subvert every theme that we associate with ethnographic filmmaking, at least as it was conceived in the early 1990’s. As she “reassembles” her footage of her Senegalese participants in unexpected ways and, in turn, forces the viewer to engage differently with what they see, Minh-ha is intentionally seeking to produce a viewing experience that is, if nothing else, not pleasurable, for those who have become used to seeing black African bodies as destitute, underdeveloped, and in need. Her narration only drives home this point, as she says quietly and directly into the microphone,“stressing the objectivity of the researcher, circles around the object of curiosity” (Minh-ha, Re-Assemblage, 1982, n.p.). What Minh-ha is reminding us is that the anthropological fetish of neutrality, authority, and authenticity, was and is a ruse which silences, objectifies, and de-humanizes those whom we are working with.The pursuit of objectivity in this characterization is the antithesis of consent.And yet, part of the trick of film is that those on screen seem to “speak” even when their words are 209

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mediated by the filmmaker.When participants look at the camera, staring back and speaking to it, they seem to implicitly give consent to the filmmaker’s re-presentations of them and therefore legitimize the authenticity and objectivity of these depictions. In early versions of presenting my own participatory work I too succumbed to this version of consent as objectivity. Because I was constantly worried about the fact that my participants were not present with me I would show film and audio footage that would seemingly make obvious my relationship to my participants and the consent that they gave to my mediated re-presentations of their realities. For example, I would share one film clip with my audiences, either juxtaposed with photographic material or independently, in which one of my participants, Aadarsha, says directly into the camera: “Hello Americans, this is Aadarsha.” The clip is short, not more than ten seconds, but in many ways the clip seems to do the work of breaking the “fourth wall” and making clear that those who I am working with knew that these American audiences would hear them and, in fact, were explicitly forging a relationship with these would-be viewers through their recordings. When I played this clip for audiences there seemed to be an underlying anxiety that I was alleviating: I was proving through this clip that my participants had, indeed, given me consent. In this case, the proof was in the sound of Aadarsha’s voice, streaming through loudspeakers as everyone in the room was made very aware of the fact that he was absolutely and playfully approving of my use of his clips. Early on, my audiences seemed also to uncritically hear his words, taking for granted that yes, he is speaking to us and they would laugh along as this short clip would then morph into a series of photographs and film clips that Aadarsha had taken while in the field. In this case, the commentary “in the frame” by my participant and the breaking of the fourth wall produced the illusion of “reality” from which consent seemed to be made obvious, especially given the words I had chosen to share. The illusion that consent had been given and that it was proven because of the statements within the frame are, of course, also the very premise of most Institutional Review Board renditions of “informed consent” (Bell, 2014). As long as our subjects state explicitly either in writing or verbally that they are willing to participate in our research, we are by and large ethically exempt, especially within a regime of “‘audit culture’ (Strathern, 2000) and the enmeshment of research ethics in a bureaucratic machinery whose surface taxonomic schemes serve to subdue and subsume difference” (Bell 2014, p. 5).The surface of the screen and of the frame functions just in this way, subsuming the complexity of ethical representation by seeming to make claims to consent more obvious than they really are. In this case, my insistence on using Aadarsha’s clip as proof of consent actually prevented the more rigorous questions by audience members about consent in relation to all those problems of production, circulation, and consumption that were hidden just behind the frame: how and why were my participants’ productions circulating, to what extent could they actually continue to rigorously give consent two and three years after the fact, how might we critically appraise the narrative and communicative strategies that I was employing during these viewing sessions? Instead, the kinds of questions that were asked became almost exclusively about my participants. That is to say, the claim to objectivity encircled and ensnared my participants, rendering them but objects of curiosity and preventing the questions of filmic framing that might have led our discussions in other directions that might have been driven by the willfulness of my participants. For example, while many asked about Aadarsha’s life in the village no one asked what Aadarsha might have thought about anything beyond the village despite the fact he is talking directly to Americans, thus circumscribing Aadarsha’s voice to that which was within the “distance of sight and observer” (Campt, 2017, p. 42). The sleight of hand technique which I used to produce the illusion of objectivity and consent is what I have been challenging myself to re-think over the past few years, trying to find 210

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ever-more innovative ways to make the frame obvious, to make audiences feel the constructedness of the material I am presenting, and to make sure that the conversations we have do not encircle my participants as objects of curiosity. In this attempt, I have been led by the work of scholars such as Audra Simpson (2016), who argues that in a regime of value that has expected the unmediated, thick description of communities over and over again, attention to refusal is perhaps the primary method of ethical and politically grounded scholarly praxis.What Simpson argues is that scholars must attend to moments of refusal rather than justify the telling of other people’s stories through discussions of consent, precisely because the story of consent has always been the story of exploitation. As I have noted in my own work, the youth whom I have been working with for the past ten years were part of a long history of representational exploitation: they have been the image of victimization and suffering which renders them “in need”. In response, I have begun to speak about my participatory work in ways that reveal my participants’ explicit refusal and the political purchase of this refusal. For example, these days I often show ethnographic footage taken by my participant Nagraj. Nagraj stayed out of the thicket of enthusiasm that arose as I began to introduce the cameras into my ninth standard classroom. Instead, he would tell me, very simply,“I’m not interested” even as he continuously asked me about my research and what I was doing there.When he did decide to take photographs, he took hundreds of photographs of objects—a frothing pot, a stove, a calendar, ceiling fans, a cat, a pomegranate tree, rice, a window, a spider crawling on the pink wall, a bottle of Pond’s moisturizer, portraits of Hindu gods, spools of thread—but never a single shot of a person. Not one. As I talk through the footage, I explain that audiences should notice that cooking is being done, and that chai is being made, and that people must be around. I ask audiences to listen to these images with me and to notice the absences in these images: what gets me to hear the particular danger Nagraj seemed to sense about the image, a visibility that the camera brought with it that he was not entirely comfortable with, and he was careful, therefore, not to depict anyone in his family even as he himself became more and more comfortable in front of the camera. I explain that Nagraj has never actually verbalized this to me, but that it was his performance of cameraman that really told me that story. In turn, what I try to reveal is less an objective view into Nagraj’s life, but instead to explain that Nagraj’s image-making reminds us that Nagraj is not consenting to his representation even as he participated in this ethnographic film and photography project.This centers the fact that our work as anthropologists is as much about opacity and ethnographic refusal as it is about what is transparently provided by our participants to us and by us to new audiences.What has occurred in response to this line of articulation is that audiences ask fewer questions about who Nagraj is and much more rigorous questions about what Nagraj’s critiques as cameraman help us to see about filmmaking, research, and suffering in India writ large. They also start to see Nagraj as someone who is capable of making critiques beyond the village: about the help industry, about the economic policies in India, and about their own positions in relation to him. In fact, audience members will actually refer to Nagraj’s refusal-based insights as openings to questions: “as Nagraj reminds us, we have to think about new versions of what help should look like, what are we then to do?”That is to say, rather than ensnaring subjects in the “distance between sight and observer” (Campt, 2017, p. 42), the image-making practices of participants like Nagraj actually begin to generate conversations about life beyond themselves and their village, taking their insights seriously in a way that might not occur otherwise.They are generating “thick descriptions” beyond the expectations of audiences rather than being “thickly described” as tokens of a type. 211

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Conclusion What I have tried to show in this chapter is some of the dilemmas I have faced when grappling with the politics of participation, pleasure, objectivity, and refusal. As I have noted many times throughout this essay, the question of participation does not end when we leave the field. Instead, it remains a guiding ideal even as we come back to our home institutions and begin to share our visual work with others. As we show our work and that of our participants, a critical attention to the kinds of questions that are produced in dialogue with audience members gives us clues to how our participants are being read and the kinds of interpretations that our re-presentations produce.These become the substance of reflection as to how our work may or may not continue in the legacy of visual ethnographic violence and how we continue to move our projects in a different direction. Sincere participation and collaboration also means bringing our anthropological understanding of visual histories, attending to how anthropologists have constructed our various objects of curiosity, and specifying how our own projects reckon with these histories (Azoulay, 2017). Ultimately, this sincerity may lead us to foreground practices of refusal, reminding our audiences that what we see on the screen are mediated glimpses into people’s lives that are as much about the very deliberate, willful, intentional actions that puncture, if even for a second, the simplistic notion that people have consented to their stories being told for them. Ultimately, of course, we will continue to stumble, and so we try our best to continue iterating on our practices based on our past mistakes, striving toward that ideal of participation that seems just outside of our reach.

Note 1 The name of the village has been changed to protect the identity of my participants.

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Participation, reception, and refusal Manzo, K. (2008). Imaging humanitarianism: NGO identity and the iconography of childhood. Antipode, 40(4), 632–657. Martinez, W. (1992). Who constructs anthropological knowledge? Toward a theory of ethnographic film spectatorship. In D. Turton & P. I. Crawford (Eds.), Film as ethnography. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 130–161. Minh-ha,Trinh T. and Jean-Paul Bourdier (1982). Reassemblage. New York:Women Make Movies. 40min, 16mm. Mirzoeff, N. (2011). The right to look:A counterhistory of visuality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mitchell, W. J. T. (1997). What do pictures want? The lives and loves of images. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Nakamura, K. (2008).A case against giving informants cameras and coming back weeks later. Anthropology News, 40, 20. Pinney, C. (1997). Camera indica. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Poole, D. (1997). Vision, race, and modernity: A visual economy of the andean world. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Rouch, J. (2003). Ciné-ethnography. S. Feld (Ed.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Shankar, A. (2014).Towards a critical visual pedagogy: A response to the ‘end of poverty’ narrative. Visual Communication, 13, 341–356. Shankar, A. (2016). Auteurship and image-making: A (gentle) critique of the photovoice method. Visual Anthropology Review, 32, 157–166. Shankar, A. (2019). Listening to images, participatory pedagogy, and anthropological (re-)inventions. American Anthropologist, 121(1), 229–242. Simpson,A. (2016). Consent’s revenge. Cultural Anthropology, 31(3), 326–333. Strathern, M. (2000). Audit Cultures:Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and the Academy. London, UK: Routledge. Strohm, K. (2012). When anthropology meets contemporary art notes for a politics of collaboration. Collaborative Anthropologies, 5, 98–124. Tobings Rony, F. (1996). The third eye: Race, cinema, and ethnographic spectacle. Durham: North Carolina: Duke University Press.

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20 COLLABORATIVE POST-PRODUCTION Jasper Chalcraft and Rose Satiko Gitirana Hikiji

This chapter examines the ethics, aesthetics, and techniques of collaborative post-production.1 In ethnographic filmmaking, collaborative post-production is a multi-faceted process, and here we focus on on only one aspect, one generally associated with the final phases of editing: the soundtrack, be it with music, sound recordings, or with the human voice. We discuss the central role that collaboration takes in some ethnographic filmmaking, calling attention for its place not only in the production process, but also in the period of “post”production, when the film is already partially or completely edited, and the soundtracks are finally introduced. We begin with a short overview of the process of collaborative post-production in general terms, underlining its benefits and drawbacks.Then, in order to further highlight the possibilities of collaboration and problems of representation we turn to two important but contrasting references: Jean Rouch’s Moi, Un Noir (1959) and Trihn T. Minh-ha’s Reassemblage—From the Firelight to the Screen (1983). Subsequently, we analyze the process of collaborative creation of Tabuluja (Wake Up!) (2017), a short film we made with Shambuyi Wetu, a Congolese artist living in Brazil, and we explore the co-creation of the “post-production” of the film, which includes improvised narration and music, language translation, and textual and filmic “fine-tuning.” When collaborative production itself is radicalized, it problematizes the very idea of postproduction. Ethnographic filmmakers, the artists being filmed (subjects of the research) and the film team—mainly the editor—act in constant collaboration through the diverse phases of the production of the film. As we will see this is no different in the context of the collaborative postproduction of the sound tracks. In order to discuss the musical/aural layers created after the first cut of the film, we also need to discuss the making of the film in a broader perspective. In all of the three films/experiences discussed here the politics of representation are approached through experiments with filmic language. In different historical contexts—post-colonial West African migration in the 1950s, rural communities in Senegal in the 1980s, and recent African migration to Brazil—African experiences are heard and seen in films made with/by non-African directors. These collaborations challenge(d) prevailing ways of making documentaries, unseating narrative voice from the control of (foreign) directors and relocating it in the pragmatic negotiations of a shared communication. In this sense, collaborative post-production continues in the tradition of technical methods of film production that actively explore and expand the ethics of representation. We do not explore here its relationship to other attempts to reframe 214

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documentary film that try to make it a less problematic form of cultural representation, from indigenous cinema since the 1970s to the performative documentaries that Nichols (2001, p. 132) describes as films highly situated, embodied, and with vividly personal perspectives. Our own strategies are derivative to a degree, but they are also improvized, shaped by the nature of the particular working relationships of those we collaborate with.This chapter therefore offers reflections rather than rules, and deliberately takes a partial and personal view of what has been a growing field of practice.

Introducing collaborative post-production Collaborative filmmaking is not new. Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922) can be considered a co-production, with the active engagement of the subjects in the filmmaking process. Jean Rouch identifies Flaherty as the inventor of “feedback,” because he would show some of his raw footage in the field to his Inuit actors who then helped him create the story. It is somewhat harder to identify the roots of collaborative post-production, but Jean Rouch’s Moi, Un Noir was certainly a milestone in attempts to engage subjects in building the final layer of the film, when the soundtrack is finally introduced.What kinds of impact can collaborating on the soundtrack bring to the ethics and aesthetics of ethnographic filmmaking? Post-production itself includes video editing, coloring and special effects, plus sound creating, recording, editing, and design. Only recently has collaborative editing become possible in anthropological filmmaking, quite simply because the equipment necessary to this phase was not easily taken to the field. In the late 1980s projects like the Brazilian Video Nas Aldeias (“Video in the Villages”) was a precursor in indigenous community-based filmmaking, but was largely focused on training people to use cameras (Araújo, 2011).The first collaborative editing only happened later when community members were brought to the editing suite, far from their homes. By contrast the post-production of sound as a key area where collaboration takes place, in part because editing demands highly technical knowledge, and also because historically ethnographic films explored precisely this aspect. Indeed, Jean Rouch himself was not an editor, preferring to count on a “third-eye” to finish his films.We consider his experiments with voice recording in Moi, Un Noir a key example of collaborative post-production of sound, as we discuss below. The main options for collaborating with post-production are not different from those of normal filmmaking. Subjects may be invited to discuss the footage; build the story; (re)narrate; soundtrack with music or other sounds; translate and/or make sense.What is unique in this kind of working are the ranges of expertise, instinct, and improvization that non-professionals bring to the processes. Fundamental here is that whilst subjects are non-professional filmmakers, they are in fact “professionals” in their lived realities, in their own stories. One aspect that distinguishes the unique contribution of such non-professionals is the “grain” and nuance that their embodied experience of the filmed situation brings to a subsequent narration or soundtracking. This is an obvious point, but it remains worth emphasizing how different their contribution is to that of a professional narrator. If a voiceover written by the director and recorded by a professional actor for an ethnographic film resonates as the “Voice of God”, by contrast the text created through collaboration with subjects can have a completely different effect: polyphonic against omnipotent, nuanced rather than authoritative. Collaborative post-production is increasingly popular because it has significant impact on the form, content, and dissemination of the films themselves. These aspects are particularly relevant because of their impact on the ethics of representation. Collaboration can enable subjects 215

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to directly represent themselves; at the same time, it also helps establish alternative worldviews, bringing other forms of knowledge and seeing to the screen. When subjects are involved in this way, they may consider the film their own, something clearly seen in how films circulate through different networks and distribution channels. In the indigenous Brazilian context, circulation of films between communities is notable, and such films often serve multiple roles: they may be used for education, public memory, and political activism.These aspects have also impacted on the aesthetic diversity of filmmaking, enriching the ways particular themes and people are portrayed. It is easy to see the advantages of collaborative post-production, but there can be downsides. To summarize, it can mask hierarchies in the filmmaking itself in all phases of production, and it does not always address the ethical problems inherent to the politics of representation. For example, many authors discuss the paternalism and problems of “giving voice”; indeed, many African filmmakers have questioned just how collaborative Rouch’s work really was as he ultimately remained the director, in control of the nature of the collaboration.Taken further,Trinh T. Minh-Ha—to whom we dedicate a section below—launched one of the most radical critiques of the limits of ethnographic filmmaking. Collaboration in post-production is not a guarantee of a successful combination of the objectives of the filmmaker and the subjects. Choices over content are very much tied to different audiences, and a single film is often incapable of bridging those differences. Furthermore, sharing control of the narrative implies a possible multiple instrumentalization of the film’s representational power. For example, some individuals or groups may appropriate a film as a legitimizing document proving their point of view to the exclusion of others. Others may feel used, exploited by the filmmakers, their engagement perceived as superficial rather than meaningful.To better understand these possibilities and problems of collaborative filmmaking we now discuss some tangible examples in more detail.

Post-synchronization as improvisation and performance The presence of voices in film reached a new dimension with Jean Rouch’s Moi, Un Noir. Jean Luc Godard was one of the first contemporary filmmakers who saw in this film a “salvation for French cinema and a door open to the new.”“Relying on chance,” Rouch opened his (and our) ears to new voices, and changed the history of cinema (Godard, 1959, p. 22, as cited in Socrates, 2009, p. 9; our translation). Moi, Un Noir presents us with a week in the life of young Nigerien immigrants who left their country to find work in the Ivory Coast at the end of the 1950s. In the beginning of the film, Rouch introduces the subject and the “actors,” and then he hands over to them. For the first time in the history of cinema, we hear the voices and thoughts of the black African actors, as they play roles not very different from their actual life experiences. Comolli (2001) calls attention to the various “régimes de parole” in Moi, Un Noir. We hear Rouch’s voiceover (and he is the big artist in these moments). We also hear the actor’s voices, and in these moments, the “comment on the image” changes its nature: it becomes a subjective narrative, an inner voice. And when the actors try to dub themselves, the post-synchronization becomes “performance, play, risk and derive” (Comolli, 2001, p.43; our translation). In the first shots, we see young men talking and laughing in a street. A voiceover introduces the subject in an expositive style2 (Nichols, 2001): everyday, young people like the characters in this film arrive in the cities of Africa. Giving up school or work in the family fields to try and find a place in the modern 216

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world. Unskilled jacks of all trades, they are one of the sicknesses of the new African towns: unemployed youth.3 The characters are introduced in a more reflexive way: the narrator lets us know that they are actors interpreting people with whom they can identify (“the film became a mirror of self-discovery”). He also explains the film’s “dispositif,” which would later become known as ethnofiction: for six months Rouch (the first narrator) followed a small group of young migrants from Niger to Treichville, Abidjan, and he proposed to them to make a film where they would play their own roles,“with no restrictions on what they wanted to do or say.And so we improvised this film.”And finally, the narrator “hands over” to the protagonist of the film, Edward J. Robinson:“He is the hero of the film.”4 The next phrase we hear in the film is spoken by Robinson, interpreted by the Nigerien actor Oumarou Ganda, who would become a long-term collaborator of Jean Rouch, and indeed a film director himself: “Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you Treichville.” This voice, despite not being in sync with the action (Robinson smiles and points to a road sign), establishes a presence: we hear the words of a young Black African man, taking control of the narrative. In each moment of the film,the actors’voices are performed differently. In a comment about the migrant condition, Robinson talks with exclamations, interrogations, and repetitions, very different from the cold and impersonal traditional master voices (Socrates, 2009, p. 27). In other moments, his narration is closer to an “interior monologue.” Socrates remarks that “Rouch incorporates, alongside his own, several other asynchronous voices, building a rich and varied soundtrack, whose relation to the images is almost always unstable and ambiguous” (2009, p. 13; our translation). Here, it is worth noting that Moi, Un Noir was one of the last films in which Rouch could not record synchronous sound and image,5 and this technical issue led the anthropologist-filmmaker to invite the protagonists to work on the soundtrack with him. Rouch was filming with a Bell & Howell 16mm camera, without sound recording. It was only afterward that ambient sounds were recorded (by André Lubin), and only three months after the editing of the film did he invite Petit Touré and Oumarou Ganda, the two main protagonists, to record the voices of the film in the studio. The film was then edited and mixed definitively in Paris by Marie-Joseph Yoyotte and Catherine Dourgnon (Paganini, 2006, p.10). Rouch comments: Three months later […] I returned to Ivory Coast, and in front of the images, Robinson [Oumarou Ganda] and Eddie Constantine [Petit Touré] improvised a text that surprised me.The first catch has always been the good one.That is to say that the film of about an hour and a half, was soundtracked at the radio in Abidjan in an hour and a half. They relived this story completely, they reinvented it. […] For me, it was the almost sacred discovery of cinema.These people lived their dreams […].As for the voice over, I invented it to plug the holes. (Rouch in Scheinfeigel, 2008, p. 150, our translation) The post-synchronization of images and sound in Moi, Un Noir results in a film built in many layers, through improvisation, co-creation, and performance. Rather than dubbing, the actors produce a dense narrative, with different inflections and reflections.As Marc Henri Piault notes, Rouch’s films became, progressively, a collective production in which actors-subjects actively participate, becoming co-authors: Those who express themselves (in the films) speak for themselves and are not actors subject to a preconceived script, they contribute in its elaboration, thus participating in 217

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the construction of an anthropological place of interrogation. In this a priori abstract space of anthropological research, a concrete situation will be created, a history will develop, that of the meeting of people who do not belong to the same culture and openly question among them their belongings, their desires, their pleasures and their obligations. (Piault, 2000, p. 217, our translation)

Asynchrony as decolonization Black screen. Silence. “Senegal, 1981” (written information on the screen). Black screen. Percussive music and voices. Silence. A man works wood. Naked torso working. Children’s faces. A man working. Old man smoking a pipe. Voice over (whispering): “Scarcely 20 years were enough to make 2 billion people define themselves as underdeveloped.” Images of fire in a forest. A woman walks on a dirt road with a basket on her head. A voice whispers: “I do not intend to speak about, just speak nearby.” The first 90 seconds of Trihn T. Minh-ha’s Reassemblage (1982) are unsettling and are followed by 38 minutes of radical montage, one which disturbs the gaze informed by the narrative conventions of most documentary and ethnographic film. Sound is not synchronized with the images, the images themselves are too fragmented, nothing contextualizes. The “voice of God” is too fragile and uncertain. Here, we understand Trihn T. Minh-ha’s montage (Reassemblage) as post-production, since her experiment relies on the radical transformation of materials recorded in the field (images, sounds), and her own voice, always whispered, recorded in the studio. To create a film that questions the very possibility of representation,Trinh T. Minh-ha breaks the conventions of synchronic direct sound, sequence plans, and linear narrative, which she classified as the basis of the “aesthetics of objectivity” (Trinh T. Minh-ha, 1991, p. 34), that pursues “naturalism across all the elements of cinematic technology” (1991, p. 34). Instead of synchronous sound—a technique that localizes and restricts “in its process of selecting sound for purposes of decipherability” (1991, p. 34)—Trinh T. Minh-ha creates a kind of soundtrack, mixing and looping human voices, music, and other sounds recorded in the field. Instead of long takes, which are thought to be more “truthful” than filmic time in the aesthetics of objectivity, the filmmaker goes for very short ones, cutting from one situation to another, making it difficult for the viewer to localize herself or even to make sense of what is being shown. Instead of wide angles, which are “claimed to be more objective because it includes more in the frame” (1991, p. 34), we see lots of close-ups, not only of faces but also of different body parts, generally framed in non-conventional ways. Trinh T. Minh-ha’s editing of images and sound (non-synchronous, fast, non-linear), associated with her voiceover (non-authoritative, whispered, female), are all part of the Reassemblage created for the film.This surrealist technique, which is also the title of the film, consists in the creation of an object that does not pursue synthesis, but the overlapping of the diverse. Instead of linearity, there is interruption:“They can’t do without cleavages. i always blink when i look” [sic] (1991, p. 58). Translation is something else that Trinh T. Minh-ha problematizes.Without subtitles for the speeches of Senegalese men and women, we are obliged to listen to their voices as music, or, in her words:“language as voice and music-grain, tone, inflections, pauses, silences, repetitions” (1991, p. 60).Against the ideology of “giving voice” to people around the world, who “are made accessible through dubbing/subtitling, transformed into English-speaking elements and brought into conformity with a definite mentality” (idem, ibidem), the author denies the viewer access 218

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to “meaning.” Instead of representation, there is evocation, in the analysis of Peter Crawford (1992). Or, in her words, instead of “speaking about,”“speaking nearby”: a speaking that does not objectify, does not point to an object as if it is distant from the speaking subject or absent from the speaking place. A speaking that reflects on itself and can come very close to a subject without, however, seizing or claiming it. A speaking in brief, whose closures are only moments of transition opening up to other possible moments of transition—these are forms of indirectness well understood by anyone in tune with poetic language. (Trinh T. Minh-ha in Chen, 1992, p. 87) Criticizing Rouch’s position as the “giver” of the voice, Trinh T. Minh-ha creates an idea of proximity not through collaboration but through her own attempt to evoke the experience of being together. In this way Trinh T. Minh-ha’s work highlights the different approaches cinematographers adopt to explore the ethics of ethnographic filmmaking in the post-colonial era.The question then is whether through the technical choices of post-production ethical positions are made visible and narration itself is effectively decolonized.

Collaborative filmmaking with Congolese artists in São Paulo “I want to make a performance. Can you help me?” These were Shambuyi Wetu’s words in a text sent through a cellphone app two weeks after our first meeting, during a concert in honor of Congolese musician and sapeur Papa Wemba in an Afro-Brazilian cultural center in São Paulo, Brazil. In our first conversation, Shambuyi introduced himself as an artist, a graduate of Kinshasa’s Ecole des Beaux Arts, living as a refugee in São Paulo for two years, and working as a precarious manual laborer. “I’m not an artist or a producer, and I’m not sure if I can help you,” was Rose’s answer to his first message. As an anthropologist doing research with African musicians migrating to São Paulo, Rose was uncertain about how to deal with this request. “You have a camera and know lots of people, it’s all I need.” answered Shambuyi, cementing our collaboration. Since 2016 we have been filming Shambuyi’s performances and collaborating to different degrees depending on the specific project. From our first footage shot during Brazil’s first World Refugee Day Festival, organized by FIRI (Independent Front for Refugees and Immigrants), we have collaborated with Shambuyi in varied locales in São Paulo, from street protests to major cultural institutions like the city’s art Biennial. Some of these projects are available in the Vimeo album of our project, Afro-Sampas.6 His work touches on different aspects of race, identity, and post-colonial politics, all of which were key parts of the film we want to discuss here, Tabuluja (Wake Up!).7 To better understand our own collaborative post-production, we need to describe the film itself, not least as it was a constant improvisation both for us and Shambuyi.The project began in September 2016 with one idea, to visit the Museu Afro Brasil, a key institutional art space in São Paulo. We were guided around it by an educator from the museum. Some of the artifacts and artworks in particular made an impression on Shambuyi, for example the room with the carcass of a slave ship, and a work by Beninois artist Gérard Quenum, with dolls’ heads stuck on top of soldiers’ helmets. Some weeks later, Shambuyi made two performances as responses to this visit and invited us to film and help facilitate them: one was during the thirty-second São Paulo Biennial, and the other was on the Day of Black Consciousness, both located in Parque Ibirapuera, one of 219

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the main leisure spots of the city. In both improvised performances—Ebandeli (Beginning) in the Biennial, and Jukayi (Rise Up)—Shambuyi’s body was repeatedly photographed as an eager public snapped selfies. To make sense of these three experiences—a museum visit, and two artistic interventions—we worked them together into a single short film, Tabuluja (Wake Up!). The collaboration continued into the post-production of the film when we asked our editor, Leo Fuzer, to produce a montage with images of the visit and of the performances that followed it to show to Shambuyi. We wanted this montage to be non-explicative, but evocative of the experience and of Shambuyi’s artistic sensibility. We then invited Shambuyi to watch this first cut, without sound, at the auditorium of the Laboratory of Image and Sound in Anthropology at the University of São Paulo. In a big screen, dark room, Shambuyi, the authors, Leo Fuzer and Ricardo Dionisio (recording direct sound), and Yannick Delass, the Congolese musician that we introduced to Shambuyi and who became his friend and artistic partner, watched the 11-minute-long mute film. Our suggestion was that we could watch the film once and then Shambuyi could narrate something over the projected images. Immediately after this first viewing, Shambuyi wanted to record and so for 11 minutes, lavalier microphone attached and without a pause, he narrated in Lingala, his eyes fixed on the screen. When the film finished, Shambuyi wanted to record again, now in Tshiluba, his mother tongue. Some days later we would have another meeting with Shambuyi’s Congolese friends, who would help him to translate part of his narration (the first minute) into Tshiluba and also helped us to translate into Portuguese all of the narration made in Lingala. But before this, right after the first recording of Shambuyi’s improvised discourse, we asked Yannick Delass if he could create a musical soundtrack to our film.We lent Yannick an acoustic guitar and modifying the guitar’s timbre with a folded piece of paper, he asked us to play the film again. In one take, watching the silent images,Yannick recorded an improvised song, voice and guitar, lasting the full length of the film.Yannick’s comment when we finished recording illustrated the depth of his engagement with Shambuyi’s work:“this was the most difficult music I’ve made in my whole life. I tried to put in the music every word that I hear from Shambuyi.” Like Rouch with the narration of Moi, Un Noir we were totally surprised and happy with the results of this improvized collaboration. Even without understanding the content of Shambuyi’s discourse, we felt that we had a film; and if the song soundtracked the emotions and ideas in Shambuyi’s words, we surely had a short film that could communicate his artistic project and political ideas more broadly. The post-production of the film—sound mixing, colouring—was made after these layers of sound and images were adjusted. And there’s nothing special about this process.The distinctive collaboration in the post-production happened in the dark auditorium where we screened and overdubbed the film, with these six people experimenting with images created and performed by one of us, filmed by two of us, edited by the third, projected and then made alive again in words and music, to finally return to the editing suite. We can’t deny our references in the process. Jean Rouch’s Moi, Un Noir and his very idea of shared anthropology was always a goal, something that theoretically inspired us. Happily, in this performance (Shambuyi knew we could work with him after all), we found our research subject was as eager to play with collaboration, co-creation, and improvization as we were.The moment in the dark room can effectively be described as “performance, play, risk and dérive” (Comolli, 2001, p.43). At the same time, Trinh T. Minh-ha’s criticism on representation gives us a strong (though unstable) basis to think about new forms from which to narrate colonial and post-colonial histories. As Shambuyi says in Tabuluja “it’s difficult for us to understand what actually happened 220

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in the past. We don’t get to read our history. Now Whites have begun to write Black history again.” Here though his voice is being heard, both as a narrator interpreting himself (somewhat like Rouch’s protagonists in Moi, Un Noir), but also through his collaboration with compatriot Delass, adding something like Trinh T. Minh-ha’s music-grain.

Conclusion We conclude with some thoughts on what Rouch, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and our short film tell us about the ethics and aesthetics of collaborative post-production, a process we still primarily value as sharing knowledge through film.We intuit that Rouch would probably recognize his influence on our film, finding parallels in the creative improvization that working on a project together provides. Our experience has been one of collective production where our actorssubjects become co-authors. However,Trinh T. Minh-ha might criticize Tabuluja for similar reasons: Shambuyi’s voice might dominate the soundtrack, underscored by his compatriot Yannick’s song, but it is a comprehensible, sense-making narration.And in this way the desire to narrate— even if in Tshiluba—sacrifices something of the power to evoke, to develop proximity through using a radical filmic language like her Reassemblage. We don’t claim that our film resolves the tensions we have outlined above, or that working collaboratively on the post-production is intrinsically a decolonizing process. However, for its enthusiasts, collaborative filmmaking offers the possibility of a “shared anthropology” and can unsettle and delegitimate the authoritative voice of more typical documentary forms, and especially the “voice of God” narration style. But we remain unsettled by Trinh T. Minh-ha, unable to evaluate what possibilities for evoking proximity our narrative-based forms of collaborative filmmaking, with their implicit ethics of sharing, sacrifice. Of course, each project, like each social context, presents unique possibilities for collaboration. And whilst collaborative post-production appears to be a positive step away from “voice of God” narrations toward a decolonization of filmmaking, we realize how nuanced and partial these can be. If collaborative filmmaking has a particular value as more than just an ethical statement, it is perhaps in its potential for indeterminacy, for finding ways to work with and represent plurality. In the case of Tabuluja, language itself is used by Shambuyi to demonstrate the overlapping edges of different worldviews, colonialisms, and structural racisms: we wanted to narrate the film in his “mother tongue,” but this was impossible, as he described that his Tshiluba was too mixed with “street” Lingala. And tellingly perhaps, in his narration he slips into French to describe race and racism, highlighting the post-colonial condition of “l’homme noire.” Nevertheless, we want to draw attention to a question: how much do collaborative coproductions like Tabuluja complicate or simplify the contexts of their social production? Indeed, when screening it, we have found the meanings and interpretations of the film to be unstable. There are two aspects to this: one the ethics of a Congolese asylum-seeker and two privileged anthropologists making a film on racism; the other, how to interpret the ubiquitous taking of selfies by the public during all of Shambuyi’s performances (this is a recurrent aspect of the film itself). Most significant was the rejection of the film’s politics by some Afro-Brazilian viewers who contested Shambuyi’s legitimacy to make statements about Brazilian racism: for some then the collaborative nature of the film’s production did not undo broader structural inequalities. We remained most disturbed by the selfies. In a screening of Tabuluja in 2019, Shambuyi told the audience that during the post-production, when he saw the smiling public taking selfies in front of his bloodied body tied to a tree, he was shocked; ultimately though he was happy as this banalization of his political statement confirmed that racism remains a huge problem for Brazil: “the message I was promoting was happening at the very instant of the performance.” 221

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In Tabuluja we see in three different ways: we see the Museu Afro-Brasil and its collection through Shambuyi’s “eyes”; we then see Shambuyi’s performances, without a clear explanation that they are a response to his visit to the museum; and finally, we see the audience’s response, mainly in their consumption of Shambuyi’s performance through the production of selfies. Besides all this imagery, there are two layers of sound/voice in the film: Shambuyi’s Tshiluba/ Lingala narrative, his voice calm, reflective, sometimes descriptive, sometimes a digression.This voiceover is not explicative, but is a complementary discourse, one further emphasized by Yannick’s improvised song.And so, if we are to offer one characterization of collaborative postproduction it is this: improvised complementarity.

Notes 1 This chapter draws on the ongoing project “Being/Becoming African in Brazil: Migrating Musics and Heritages,” which is part of the larger framework project “Local Musicking: New Pathways for Ethnomusicology” (funded by Fapesp grants 2016/06840-9 and 2016/05318-7). Rose Satiko Hikiji is a CNPq productivity fellow 309705/2016-9. 2 Bill Nichols (2001) classifies different “modes of representation” in documentary. In the expositive, the text is directed to the spectator, with texts or voices that create an argument about the historical world, the “voice of God.” Nichols identifies Rouch in a participatory mode, but we are arguing that he can use, in the same film, expositive and reflexive strategies. 3 This and the next quotes are transcriptions of the narration of the English-version of the film. 4 To Marc Henri Piault, in Moi, Un Noir the opening scene, when Rouch hands over to Oumarou Ganda, explodes “the sacred mountain from which the observer declares his right to ennunciate the truth of the world” (Piault, 2000, p. 213; our translation). 5 In Chronique D’un Eté (Morin and Rouch 1961), released two years later, Rouch worked with syncronous sound. Some critiques consider Moi, Un Noir more innovative in terms of sound narrative than Chronique D’un Eté: the syncronous sound would have brought naturalism to dialogues, in opposition to the complexity of the diverse voice perfromances of Moi, Un Noir (see Socrates, 2009, p. 100; Commoli, 2001, p. 46). 6 https://vimeo.com/showcase/4168747. 7 https://vimeo.com/lisausp/tabulujaeng.

References Araújo,A. (Ed.). (2011). Vídeo nas Aldeias - 25 anos. Olinda:Vídeo nas Aldeias. Chalcraft, J., Hikiji, R., & Wetu, S. (Directors). (2017). Tabuluja (wake up) [Motion picture]. Brazil: Laboratory of Image and Sound in Anthropology. Retrieved from https://vimeo.com/lisausp/tabulujaeng Chen, N. N. (1992).“Speaking nearby”:A conversation with Trinh T. Minh-ha. Visual Anthropology Review, 8, 82–91. doi:10.1525/var.1992.8.1.82 Comolli, J.-L. (2001). Ici et maintenant, d’un cinéma sans maître? In J.-L. Comolli, G. Leblanc, & J. Narboni (Eds.), Les années pop – cinéma et politique: 1956-1970 (pp. 33–59). Paris: Bpi-Centre Georges Pompidou. Crawford, P. (1992). Film as discourse: The invention of anthropological realities. In P. Crawford & D. Turton (Eds.), Film as ethnography. Manchester/New York: Manchester University Press. Flaherty, R. (Director). (1922). Nanook of the north [Motion picture]. United States/France: Les Frères Revillon & Pathé Exchange. Minh-ha, T.T. (1991). When the Moon waxes red: Representation, gender and cultural politics. London: Routledge. Morin, E., & Rouch, J. (Directors). (1961). Chronique d’un été (Chronicle of a summer) [Motion picture]. France: Argos Films. Nichols, B. (2001). Introduction to documentary. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Paganini,A. (2006). La musculature et la respiration des films – Continuité et discontinuité en rapport avec certaines contraintes techniques dans le cinéma de Jean Rouch. Retrieved from http://www.comiteduf ilmethnographique.com/andrea-paganini/, 2019-07-01. Piault, M.-H. (2000). Anthropologie et Cinéma. Passage à l’image, passage par l’image. Paris: Nathan. Rouch, J. (Director). (1959). Moi, un noir [Motion picture]. France: Les Films de la Pléiades.

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Collaborative post-production Scheinfeigel, M. (2008). Jean Rouch. Paris: CNRS Éditions. Sócrates, L. (2009). Quem diz ‘Eu, um negro’? Vozes e foco narrativo no filme de Jean Rouch. (Master dissertation). Escola de Comunicações e Artes, Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brasil. Trinh,T. Minh-ha (Director). (1982). Reassemblage - From the firelight to the screen [Motion picture]. United States.

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21 FILMING WITH NONHUMANS Sarah Abbott

Ethnographic modes of inquiry for research with nonhumans require the same rigor as research applied to human subjects. This ensures researcher accountability to and sensitized care for nonhuman participants, so as not to separate nonhumans from their known spaces and ways of being, or disregard their needs and realities. Nonhumans, just as humans, are conative entities, meaningful to themselves in their unique efforts to survive and actualize their inherent potentials (Mathews, 2008). In simpler words, nonhumans are deeply embedded in their own life force, purpose, and interconnections with the environment(s) they interact with as home and community.Awareness of how blinders rooted in Western anthropocentric and reductionist stances inform the ways modern humans understand and treat the world we live in (Mathews, 2006) is key to allowing that other beings are also “listening, speaking” (Abram, 1996, p. 86), as individuals and as community, with unique languages, lifeways, and sensibilities, even when these are unobservable to humans. In this chapter, I invite readers to reconsider Western traditions of regard for nonhumans through holistic approaches to ethnographic and filmic methods and representation. As Grusin (2015) reflects, the nonhuman turn, growing since the last decades of the twentieth century, has been “understood variously in terms of animals, affectivity, bodies, organic and geophysical systems, materiality, or technologies” (p. vii). By “nonhuman” herein, I refer to all beings who are other than human and reside in nature, including plants, stones, mountains, land, and water. Extending from millennia of Western beliefs in human superiority, the history of film is loaded with disregard for nonhuman participants, be they main actors, cast in supporting roles, or present as “background.”As Collard (2016) expands on, from its early days, film has revolved around the notion that animals are disposable (Bousé, 2000). In 1903,Thomas Edison had Topsy, a circus elephant in New York, publicly electrocuted so he could capture the event on film (Collard, 2016). Disney’s nature films, from the outset, “supported the notion that the natural world’s chief value lies in the profit that industrial society can extract from it” (Clarke, 1998, para. 4), and the manipulation of wild animals, Disney claimed, was for the purpose of entertainment (Clarke, 1998). For It’s a Wonderful Life (Capra, 1946), 6,000 gallons of “foamite (the material used in fire extinguishers) [mixed] with sugar, water and soap flakes … [was] pumped at high pressure … to cover the four-acre [California] set, [including] 20 fully grown oak trees” (BBC, 2019, para. 7 and 8). Dolomite and asbestos were also used to create snow for films (BBC, 2019). During filming for The Beach (MacDonald, 2000), starring Leonardo DiCaprio, the complex 224

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ecosystem of a Thai island was altered to better fit the Hollywood filmmakers’ vision of a tropical paradise (Vidal, 1999). Ethnographic film tends to be situated in naturalistic, uncoerced portrayals of subject matter, so such irreverence would likely not enter researchers’ minds let alone their research designs. In recent decades, filmmakers and audiences have grown more demanding for humane treatment of animals and ecosystems (Bradley, 2017). Leading wildlife filmmakers strictly practice non-intervention during filming, though breaking this rule is lauded if intervention saves animals threatened by natural or human-made circumstances (Furness, 2016; Mohdin, 2018;).Whatever the level of presence on the part of filmmakers and researchers, there is always a residue, a cinematic “footprint” (Bozak, 2012, p. 12), whether nonhumans are the focus of attention or contributing to the setting. Even the “simple” act of looking at nonhumans without a camera can be invasive—or, rather, coconstitutive. As any gesture of observation is felt by humans, so it is by nonhumans.Think of the flock of sparrows happily tweeting in a bush who, when a passerby pauses to appreciate them, flit anxiously to the nearest tree. Humans and nonhumans alike become who we are through interaction with others, including through mutual looking that, in some cases, “does not require actual eyes—a tree’s leaves can do it” (Michael Marder, personal communication,April 18, 2019).

Nonhuman knowing and ethnographic approaches In their review of four prominent peer-reviewed anthropology journals, one of the dominant trends in socio-cultural anthropology identified by Hamilton and Placas (2011) is “methodological experiments with natureculture (with a specific focus on the emergence of multispecies ethnography)” (p. 246). Franklin’s (2001) support for the historical interpenetration of nature and culture, contends that their fabricated boundaries have been breached in practice and theory because their separation was never actually achieved. Dualistic separation of humans and nonhumans, and nature and culture, is innately foreign to Indigenous worldviews. Indigenous knowing and research methodology advocate a holistic approach aimed at maintaining unity and restoration of the collective rather than the individual (Lawson-Te Aho and Liu, 2010)—for humans and nonhumans—with a responsibility to and for shared knowledge (Baskin, 2005). With the caveat that “knowledge systems of Indigenous peoples vary throughout the world and even within countries” (p. 22), Lavallée (2009, p. 21) writes The relational nature of Indigenous epistemology acknowledges the interconnectedness of the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual aspects of individuals with all living things and with the earth, the star world, and the universe. Indigenous epistemology is fluid, nonlinear, and relational. Western worldviews evolved from “animistic, relational” sensibilities with “explicit recognition of kinship between [all] living things” (Hall, 2011, pp. 17–18), to worldviews based in humancentered hierarchical, positivist, reductionist, and consumer stances.This change was embedded in intention, lack of attention, education, religion, science, colonization, and political power beginning with Plato and Aristotle (Hall, 2011; Marder, 2013). In summarizing their 94 calls to action, commissioners of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (2015) assert the importance of reconciliation with the Earth to reconciliation with Indigenous peoples in the devastating wake of colonialism:“Indigenous laws stress that humans must journey through life in conversation and negotiation with all creation” (p. 18). Ethnography and ethnographic films evidence relational knowledge. As Lien and Pálsson, (2019) argue, ethnographic “attention to the ‘other-than-human’ has been … sidelined by 225

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human-centered theoretical pursuits” (p. 7). Moving beyond the anthropocentric traditions of ethnography, its tenets can be considered in the context of research with nonhuman participants and their unique ontologies: ability to access habitual and non-verbal aspects of behaviour (through observation); more naturalistic; offer a means to focus on dynamic processes involved in behaviour; focus on meanings, experiences and concerns of individuals within a specific context; can situate analyses of behaviour in the broader socio-cultural context. (Yardley and Bishop, 2008, p. 363) The concept of biosocial becoming (Ingold, 2013; Pálsson, 2013) views nonhuman and human life as evolving equally and intrinsically through social and biological influences. Humans and nonhumans are “fluid beings, with flexible, porous boundaries […] necessarily embedded in relations, neither purely biological nor purely social […] their essence is best rendered as something constantly in the making” (Pálsson, 2013, p. 39).As such, all creatures should be thought of not in terms of “what they are, but of what they do”—“not as beings but as becomings—[…] not as discrete and pre-formed entities but as trajectories of movement and growth” (Ingold, 2013, p. 8, emphasis in original). Situating nonhumans within such ontological understanding of biosocial relations acknowledges “the becoming of every constituent” as well as the ways in which each constituent “conditions and is conditioned by the becomings of other constituents to which it relates” (p. 8).This is the essence of ethnography with nonhumans. Ethnographic and filmic approaches to nonhumans ask researchers to be “open to methodological innovation [and] ready to surrender at least some control over the research process” (Vannini and Mosher, 2013, p. 396), because research is necessarily inductive; informed by contextual interrelations (Mitchell, 2007); and, as members of different species, nonhuman participants are not well known by human researchers. Expanding on Marder (2017), to hear and represent nonhumans ethically,“we must learn to listen to the lacunae and silences in [their] language, leaving plenty of room for the untranslatable (and, hence, the unspeakable) in … practices of translation” (p. 105). Because the vast and intricate realm of nonhuman worlds is largely impenetrable by humans, blocked further by Western blinders, problematic presuppositions and assumptions regarding the existence of others, or the “Other,” (Denzin (2014) can arise in studies of nonhumans.This is rich ground for researcher reflexivity.The gaze of the Other can be engaged to direct the gaze of the researcher, creating “a double perspective” (p. 7), awareness of interconnection, and the impossibility for research to be completely objective. The innate connection between researchers and participants is always becoming, while “all concerned are connected to all other living things” (Lavallée, 2009, pp. 23–24). My own growing, now ever-present awareness of respectful considerations and interactions with nonhumans stems from research for my interdisciplinary dissertation,“An ethnography of trees: sensuous scholarship in plant ontologies and environmental empathy.” My doctoral work aims to understand the sentient relationality of trees through ethnographic inquiry, Indigenous and Western worldviews, close relationships between people and trees, plant science, philosophies of plant and nonhuman knowing, and interspecies communication. Drawing on my experience as a filmmaker, the primary output for the dissertation is a film.

Filmic approaches to nonhumans Filmmaking techniques, or methods, involve the use of filmmaking equipment during production, or fieldwork, in ways reflective of specific filmmaking styles that are shaped through the 226

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edit of a film.The allowances and limits of all methods inform the footage, or data, produced as well as the final representation of subjects and their ontologies. Different styles hold different potentials. Observational style filmmaking is well suited to filming with nonhumans for its seemingly unmediated, “naturally unfolding action and interaction through extremely long camera takes, exclusively diegetic sound, and the [illusory] absent presence of the camera and filmmaker” (Vannini, 2014, p. 10; see Olivieri, this book).The goal is to “capture events just as people [and nonhumans] live them” (Rabiger, 2009, p. 84). In contrast, participatory style films involve the researcher actively participating in the subject matter s/he seeks to understand as another means of observing it (Vannini, 2014). The camera and filmmaker “are avowedly present and inquiring, ready to catalyze, if necessary, an interaction between participants and between participants and themselves” (Rabiger, 2009, p. 260). Both observational and participatory style documentaries seek to bring the sights and sounds of encounters alive through the intimacy of ethnographic details,“in all their partiality, contingency, and complexity” (Vannini, 2014, p. 12). The poetic style of documentary film positions aesthetics, nonlinear structuring, and untraditional representation as central to meaning and expression. It is “explicitly interpretive work, based on the concept of the subject or set of formal conventions” (MacDougall, 2011, p. 108). Although it may be tempting to represent interpretations of nonhuman ontologies through poetic devices, there is risk of anthropocentric and anthropomorphizing projection as well as limitations of subjective interpretation and representation that can obscure nonhuman participant ontologies, voices, and concerns. Researchers need to be keenly reflexive in this context, alert to receiving communication from nonhumans about particular ways they may want to be represented, and remembering that cinema is a form and language of communication with limitations exclusive to humans. Before any filming, it is vital that researchers first take the time, perhaps a lot of time, to make connections with nonhuman participants, as individuals and as a community. As Myers (2017) writes, “attunements to other sentiences require cultivating subtler sensitivities” (p. 76). This involves moving into a felt, embodied engagement with sensual, intuitive knowing.With mindful and discerning attention, this internal space can also become ground for telepathic interaction with nonhumans, and a research tool in itself.As an “innate ability [that] lies dormant in all of us” (Getten, 2006, p. 6), interspecies telepathic communication emerges from a place of inner silence. Introducing oneself, and asking permission of nonhumans via direct communication is key to mutuality in relations. As is being prepared to respectfully accept and make changes if permission is denied. In keeping with many Indigenous protocols, learning to offer tobacco as a gesture of request, acknowledgment, and gratitude may be appropriate. Heartful intention is felt by nonhumans. Outlining reasons and ways of working with nonhumans is as ethically important as when working with human participants. All of these gestures toward a mutual conversation can be assisted by the skills of a reputable interspecies communicator.There may be surprising responses, such as a desire on the part of nonhumans for privacy (Mills, 2010). In the interview for my doctoral research, Cree Elder Doreen Spence shared a story about being asked by German acquaintances if she would take them into an Alberta forest. Her story stands as a good rule of thumb when stepping into nonhuman territories: We got out of the car and this old guy puts his backpack on and he was going to go in. And I said to him,‘No, it’s not our right just to walk into the forest and just do what we do.’ I said,‘No, you have to ask permission,’ and those trees just went still, like very still. And then as soon as I asked for permission, gave my offering, their little leaves started clapping and they were just very happy that we asked permission to go into the 227

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forest, that we wouldn’t harm anything, that we wouldn’t be taking anything.We were just going to enjoy the breath and the beauty and their experience with them. (July 29, 2016, emphasis added) Just as important as offering greetings and asking permission, so too are gestures of farewell. This realization hit after leaving the initial meeting for a tree talk I was invited to give for a local organization. I walked back into the park across the street to say hello again to the trees and realized the importance of this in terms of closure, gratitude, relationality. Making this extra effort is the last thing we humans would think to do, or want to do, when we’re tired after a day’s work.We look around, make sure we have our stuff, say goodbye to the people in our midst, then leave. We would say goodbye to all the people we worked with, and wish them well, but we don’t do this with the nature beings in our midst. Saying goodbye is part of the relationship, the thread of connection that continues past the end of time of physical contact—it closes this time and extends into the future. (fieldnote, July 11, 2018) The more I came to know—and not know—trees through my study, the more difficult it was for me to film them. In my discussion of filmic techniques above and below, there is a tension within methods of observation—between active, reciprocal, engaged activities that involve humans entering nonhuman environs, and understanding nonhuman worlds as nonhumans experience and shape them, without interference on the part of humans.The latter is impossible if we want to know nonhumans because any time we enter their worlds we affect them.The tension emerges when ethics of relationship with nonhumans are deeply considered in any discipline. My goal here is to stress as a method of research the imperative that researchers and filmmakers de-center their human selves when they work with nonhumans and the complex intricacy of their worlds.

Representing nonhumans For cinematic techniques of representation, I turn to two films.The first, Mountain (McGowan and Peedom, 2017), directed by Australian Jennifer Peedom, is observational in its approach and use of spectacular imagery as it explores worldwide high peaks and peoples’ relationships with them.The film opens with Willem Dafoe preparing for a “voice of God” narration (including uncited passages from MacFarlane’s (2003) Mountains of the Mind:A History of Fascination) as the Australian Chamber Orchestra tunes up its instruments for musical accompaniment.The sense is that Peedom needs to preface the mountains with a human presence, not letting the mountains speak for themselves at the outset [reminding me of feedback from a White viewer that I, a White Canadian filmmaker, should introduce the Black man in my documentary, Tide Marks, before he tells his own life story within South Africa’s apartheid, as a signal to the audience that they can trust him (Abbott, 2004)]. The drone cinematography in Mountain takes viewers to places and sights that are impossible for humans to visit and view.These pervasive aerial images certainly wow and inform, but the steady, linear gaze is neither human, nor naturally nonhuman.To tell a story of mountains that acknowledges their ontologies, the camera also needs to explore closer, more intimate details, and the audio needs to know the variety and intensities of sounds in the various environments, nooks, and crannies. Although Peedom blankets the imagery with near-constant classical music, confining the mountains to a Western viewpoint

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and a human frame, the mountains are given more space to speak toward the end of the film as the pristine, awesome peaks give way to deforestation, mining, and tourist recreation assaults, and Dafoe’s narration eases to silent respect for the majesty of mountains in and for their own right. Overall, Peedom’s assembly is heavy with authoritative tropes instilled in traditional uses of observational film and male voice of God narration. As all films are naturally the subject of their director’s vision, human directors can stand aside to let the voices of their nonhuman participants speak with more presence. Canadian director Julia Barnes is largely successful in her representation of the extreme loss of ocean-dwelling nonhumans, devastated by acidification and temperature increases of the water, trawling and over-fishing practices, and pollution. Her film, Sea of Life (Barnes, 2016), gives voice to these nonhumans and their dying or threatened living spaces and communities through its use of rich observational and participatory style footage gathered underwater. Images on dry land of interviews with human experts of oceanic nonhumans and establishing shots are used sparingly, along with the odd text card stating statistics such as the daily loss of two hundred ocean species. Barne’s underwater footage of herself and human participants swimming with sharks, whales, and manta rays adds a sense of intimacy, wonder, and human connection.The film would be stronger without the near constant “muzak” accompanying the underwater footage, including instead a variety of underwater soundscapes. In the very long list of appearances that starts the film’s credit roll, Barnes includes nonhumans along with human participants.The first eight entities listed are: “Julia Barnes, Great Hammerheads, Remoras, Nurse Sharks, Louie Psihoyos, Minke Whale, Manta Rays, Flamboyant Cuttlefish, Zooplankton” (Barnes, 2016). It would have been preferable if Barnes did not begin the film with herself; however, part of the film’s story and inspiration is her quest as a very young human to bring attention to the serious loss of sea life. Just as developments in the portability of media technology in the 1950’s and 1960’s enabled filmmakers to leave the studio and move into the worlds people inhabit (Ellis and McLane, 2005), recent developments in technology give researchers and filmmakers opportunities to probe and mediate understandings of nonhuman worlds.Although “audiences [and researchers] delight in the intimate encounters with animals that film affords” (Collard, 2016, p. 473), use of all media technologies requires critical and ethical attention with regard to impacts on nonhumans and their communities, data collection, representation, and messaging.Audio and imaging innovations are constrained only by the imaginations and ethics of people using these tools, and there are varying levels of invasiveness, vulnerability, and volunteerism for nonhumans. Scientific and artist-produced equipment can render audible the inner worlds of nonhumans, such as the translation of electrical activity in slime mold via computer into song-like oscillations as “a collaboration between human and organism” (Stinson, 2015, n.p.); the highly sensitive microphone designed by artist Alex Metcalf to record tree transpiration processes (Metcalf, 2019); and underwater audio recording devices. Drones and underwater cameras enable bird and fish eye views. Realistic, robotic animal replicas with internal cameras can penetrate nonhuman worlds, such as the “spy creatures” in the BBC’ s documentary series Spy in the Snow (Shersby, 2019). National Geographic’s Crittercam technology, developed from animal radio tagging, was also devised to expose what animals do in their wild lives. It consists of a water- and pressure-proof package of instruments that record video, sound and data, […] affixed to wild animals by various means: suction cups for whales and leatherback turtles, fin clamps for sharks, backpack harnesses for penguins, or adhesive for seals and hardback turtles. (Collard, 2016, p. 473)

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Again, there are varying levels of volunteerism and vulnerability that engaging nonhumans with technology can exploit. I have already signaled the ethics of approach.These technologies allow humans to vicariously be in the realms of birds, fish, and other nonhuman life, but the perceptual organs, modes of processing, and habits of being of these nonhumans are very different from our own.We may be seeing and hearing from their positions, “but not as they see [and hear]” (Naomi Scheman, personal communication, January 3, 2019, italics in original). Various technical aspects of film apparatuses can be manipulated to evoke nonhuman words, often with poetic effect. In his treatise The Elements of Drawing, John Ruskin (1857) repeatedly advises artists to be alert to the “leading lines” of subjects, formed via life interactions with elements, circumstances, and other beings in history, the present, and the future. Sound and image in media technology can be similarly engaged during production and post-production to imagine and represent the biosocial factors of becoming. Ruskin writes Your dunce thinks they are standing still, and draws them all fixed; your wise man sees the change or changing in them, and draws them so—the animal in its motion, the tree and its growth, the cloud in its course, the mountain in its wearing away.Try always, whenever you look at a form, to see the lines in it which have had power over its past fate and will have power over its futurity. (1857, p. 121) In her project Becoming Sensor in Sentient Worlds, Myers (2017) represents the natureculture of Toronto’s 10,000-year-old Oak Savannah through natural and altered soundscapes and photographic imagery via plays with time, soft focus, and shutter speeds. Her poetic representations align with the project’s aims to unsettle and make strange the ways conventional ecology continues to be deployed not only to colonize land, but also to colonize our imaginations; [and] ways of knowing the living world, most especially those local and Indigenous knowledges that are attuned to the sentience of lands and bodies. (p. 77) Myers offers techniques for kinesthetic modes of imaging, listening, and smelling to stimulate attunement to “the affectively charged relations taking shape among lands and bodies” (p. 87). In my short filmic experiment, Gestures Toward Plant Seeing (Abbott, 2020), I ponder the way plants in general might see by adjusting camera settings for aperture, shutter speed, and light sensitivity (ISO), and explore effects of layering, brightness, color, and time in the editing software. Adjustments to audio and image speeds can aid in understanding aspects of nonhumans, such as slowing down bird songs to study the structure of their languages. Time lapse photography and video can condense time to render visible nature’s slow movements. In the interview for my doctoral research, Paco Calvo, a philosopher of plant science, imparted insights gained while using time lapse photography to track the sophisticated behaviors of plants. It’s important to give some thought to what time lapse means, because animation is so intuitive, so impressive, so powerful. … When you get to see three or four days of plant behavior all condensed into a little time lapse film of two minutes, then you might think that’s what is actually happening. But you need to remember there are gaps between picture and picture that can last between five and ten minutes, and you 230

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don’t know what’s happening in those five to ten minutes. … You might be deluding yourself into seeing more than is actually there. (October 18, 2016) Turning to Darwin’s patient, nineteenth-century method of directly observing plant behaviors au naturel, Calvo was inspired to slow himself down to the plants’ pace in order to get into their “time window.” He had been having difficulty interpreting time lapse without getting over-excited, and I came to realize that it’s a whole different world. … To watch a plant that moves an inch every half an hour say, and watch it for a few hours, that requires some serious mental exercise. … Once you get to appreciate what they do at their pace, then you can go back to the time lapse for the sake of speeding things up. … So you are not actually observing their behavior itself, but a concentrated version of it. (October 18, 2016) Another aspect to consider when representing nonhumans is their “time window” within the run-time constraints of films, television episodes, and webcasts. Pace in nonhuman worlds is often slow. Clarke (1998) writes of the distortion of nature in Disney films, but pressures of time, money, and entertainment manipulate all cinematic renderings of nonhuman worlds. A two-hour film may show enough vigorous activity to fill a year of an animal’s actual life. Gone are the endless hours of silence, the slow changes in sky and light, the arduous and heavy-laden progress along a steep trail. … Seasons cycle in less time than it takes to get to the bottom of your popcorn bag.The complex and interwoven rhythm of nature […] is lost, replaced by rhythms measured in frames per second. (para. 22)

Conclusion: knowing nonhumans The aware, caring methods and reflexivity of trained ethnographers can bring about a deeper, less invasive, and collaborative knowing of nonhumans in their unique ontologies and spaces to move beyond the limits and harm of traditional Western approaches. Research and filming with a balance of attention to film technicalities and a meditative, embodied, deep listening state in connection with the world around us is challenging. It is a practice that requires gentle patience and encouragement as we repattern toward re-knowing. I close with insight from a bird. In the first workshop she took, at the start of a 25-year career in interspecies communication, Getten (2006) was mortified when Pirouette, the cockatiel she had been paired with for her first nonhuman communication attempt finally said, “Can’t you say anything but hello?” Shamefully, Getten realized, “There I was, a human, a member of the dominant species on the planet, and I couldn’t even think of a single thing to ask a bird” (p. 24). The Indigenous phrase “all my relations” profoundly acknowledges a beginningless and endless interrelation of all things.As Wagamese (2013) explains, to understand this phrase is “to come to understand that you are alive because everything else is” (para. 2) and has been, in our collective, diverse ways of being and knowing. Humans and nonhumans have much to talk about. It’s up to us to (re)initiate conversations and collaborations, with equanimity, respectful intention, and engaging curiosity. 231

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References Abbott, S. (Producer & Director). (2004). Tide marks. [Motion picture]. Toronto, ON, Canada: Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre. Abbott, S. (Producer & Director). (2020). Gestures toward plant seeing. [Motion picture]. Canada: Amoeba Works. Retrieved from www.sarahabbott.ca Abram, D. (1996). The spell of the sensuous: Perception and language in a more-than-human world. New York, NY: Vintage Books. Barnes, J. (Producer & Director). (2016). Sea of life. [Motion picture]. Oceanic Productions. Canada. Retrieved from http://www.seaoflifemovie.com Baskin, C. (2005). Circles of inclusion: Aboriginal world views in social work education (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from ProQuest Dissertations and Theses, 265. (Order No. NR27745).Toronto: University of Toronto. https://search.library.utoronto.ca/details?5650684 BBC. (2019). Blizzard wizards: How special effects team made snow in it’s a wonderful life. BBC Arts. Retrieved from https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/YYy7rDW8ls2vSntsj0RrMZ/blizz ard-wizards-how-special-effects-team-made-snow-in-its-a-wonderful-life Bousé, D. (2000). Wildlife films. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Bozak, N. (2012). The cinematic footprint: Lights, camera, natural resources. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Bradley, L. (2017, January 23).What really happened to that dog on the set of a dog’s purpose? [updated]. Vanity Fair.Retrieved from https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2017/01/a-dogs-purpose-animalabuse-gavin-polone-response Capra, F. (Producer & Director). (1946). It’s a wonderful life [Motion picture]. United States: Liberty Films. Clarke, C. (1998, December 5). Nature. New Internationalist. Retrieved from https://newint.org/featur es/1998/12/05/nature Collard, R. C. (2016). Electric elephants and the lively/lethal energies of wildlife documentary film. Area, 48(4), 472–479. Denzin, N. K. (2014). Interpretive ethnography (2nd ed.). Los Angeles, CA: Sage Publications. Ellis, J. C., & McLane, B.A. (2005). A new history of documentary film. New York, NY: Continuum. Franklin, A. (2001). Nature and social theory. London: SAGE Publications, Ltd. Furness, H. (2016, December 12). Planet Earth II filmmakers defy convention to save lost baby turtles. The Telegraph. Retrieved from https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/12/12/bbc-planet-earth-iifilmmakers-defy-convention-save-lost-baby/ Getten, M. (2006). Communicating with orcas: The whales’ perspective. Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Roads Publishing Company Inc. Grusin, R. (2015). Introduction. In R. Grusin (Ed.), The nonhuman turn (pp. vii–xxix) Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Hall, M. (2011). Plants as persons:A philosophical botany.Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Hamilton, J.A., & Placas,A. J. (2011).Anthropology becoming…? the 2010 sociocultural anthropology year in review. American Anthropologist, 113(2), 246–261. Ingold,T. (2013). Prospect. In T. Ingold & G. Pálsson (Eds.), Biosocial becomings: Integrating social and biological anthropology (pp. 1–21). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lavallée, L. F. (2009). Practical application of an indigenous research framework and two qualitative indigenous research methods: Sharing circles and Anishnaabe symbol-based reflection. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 8(1), 21–40. Lawson-Te Aho, K., & Liu, J. (2010). Indigenous suicide and colonization:The legacy of violence and the necessity of self-determination. International Journal of Conflict and Violence, 4(1), 124–133. Lien, M. E., & Pálsson, G. (Eds.). (2019). Ethnography beyond the human:The ‘other-than-human’ in ethnographic work. ETHNOS Journal of Anthropology, 84, 1-20. MacDonald, A. (2000). The beach [Motion picture]. United States: Figment Films. MacDougall, D. (2011). Anthropological filmmaking: An empirical art. In E. Margolis & L. Pauwels (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of visual research methods (pp. 99–113). Los Angeles, CA: SAGE. Macfarlane, R. (2003). Mountains of the mind:A history of a fascination. London: Granta. Marder, M. (2013). Plant-thinking:A philosophy of vegetal life. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Marder, M. (2017).To hear plants speak. In M. Gagliano, J. C. Ryan, & P.Vieira (Eds.), The language of plants: Science, philosophy, literature (pp. 103–125) Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Mathews, F. (2006). Beyond modernity and tradition: A third way for development. Ethics and the Environment, 11(2), 85–113.

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Filming with nonhumans Mathews, F. (2008).Thinking from within the calyx of nature. Environmental Values, 17(1), 41–65. McGowan, J. (Producer), & Peedom, J. (Producer & Director). (2017). Mountain. [Motion picture]. East Melbourne,VIC,Australia: Madman Entertainment. Metcalf,A. (2019).The tree listening project. Retrieved from https://www.treelistening.co.uk Mills, B. (2010).Television wildlife documentaries and animals’ right to privacy. Continuum, 24, 193–202. Mitchell, J. (2007). Ethnography. In W. Outhwaite & S. Turner (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of social science methodology (pp. 55–67). London: SAGE Publications Ltd. Mohdin,A. (2018, November 19).Top film-makers back penguin intervention on Attenborough show. The Gaurdian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2018/nov/19/top-filmmake rs-back-penguin-intervention-on-attenborough-show Myers, N. (2017). Becoming sensor in sentient worlds: A more-than-natural history of a black oak savannah. In G. Bakke & M. Peterson (Eds.), Between matter and method: Encounters in anthropology and art (pp. 73–96). London: Bloomsbury Press. Pálsson, G. (2013). Ensembles of biosocial relations. In T. Ingold & G. Pálsson (Eds.), Biosocial becomings: Integrating social and biological anthropology (pp. 22–41). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rabiger, M. (2009). Directing the documentary (5th ed.).Amsterdam: Focal Press. Ruskin, J. (1857). The elements of drawing in three letters to beginners. London: Smith, Elder & Co. Shersby, M. (2019).When is spy in the snow on TV? Discover Wildlife. Retrieved from https://www.discover wildlife.com/news/when-is-spy-in-the-snow-on-tv/ Stinson, L. (2015, October 6). Listen to slime mold sing a song. Wired. Retrieved from https://www.wired. com/2015/10/listen-slime-mold-sing-song/ The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. (2015). Honouring the truth, reconciling for the future: Summary of the final report of the truth and reconciliation commission of Canada. Retrieved from http:// publications.gc.ca/site/eng/9.800288/publication.html Vannini, P., & Mosher, H. (2013). Public ethnography: An introduction to the special issue. Qualitative Research, 13(4), 391–401. Vannini, P. (2014). Ethnographic film and video on hybrid television: Learning from the content, style, and distribution of popular ethnographic documentaries. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 44(4), 1–26. Vidal, J. (1999). DiCaprio film-makers face storm over paradise lost. The Guardian. Retrieved from https:// www.theguardian.com/film/1999/oct/29/news.johnvidal Wagamese, R. (2013, June 11). Wagamese: ‘All my relations’ about respect. The Kamloops Daily News. Retrieved from http://www.kamloopsnews.ca/article/20130611/KAMLOOPS0304/130619980/ 0/kamloo ps/wagamese-all-by-relations-about-respect&template=JQMArticle Yardley, L., & Bishop, F. (2008). Mixing qualitative and quantitative methods: A pragmatic approach. In C. Willig & W. Stainton-Rogers (Eds.), The Sage handbook of qualitative research in psychology (pp. 352–369). London: Sage Publications.

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PART 5

Working with tools and techniques

Part 5 Introduction Once, not too long ago at all, there were just three tools ethnographic filmmakers really needed to deal with: a video camera, a sound recorder, and an editing machine.The options are much broader in 2020.Video cameras have become more diverse from one another than ever; there are digital single-lens reflex cameras (DSLRs), mirrorless, digital film, and film cameras. There are cell phone cameras, wearable cameras, and iPads—only to mention a few. Then there are countless options for recording sound, ranging from a wide variety of microphones to an everexpanding variety of sound recorders and field mixers that are easy to use and light and portable. And while desktop computers have made the editing process easier, they have also complicated the number of decisions an editor—most likely than not an ethnographer working alone trying to do it all—must make, ranging from computer selections, to painstaking choices over non-linear editing software platforms, codecs, and delivery formats. Without delving into the excruciating minutia of the technical world of ethnographic filmmaking, chapters in Part 5 of the handbook expand the ethnographic filmmakers’ options even further by surveying four emerging traditions that most of us have limited experience with. We begin with what is probably the most ground-breaking technical innovation of the second decade of the twenty-first century: wearable body cameras, often referred to as GoPros following the popularity of the leading brand. It is safe to say that GoPros have revolutionized the way ethnographers can do visual research.They are light, cheap, portable by definition, incredibly easy to use, and while they offer a limited worldview—a (very) wide angle and a distinctly terrible sound—they generate remarkably clear and crisp images up to 4k resolution. GoPros and their imitations can now simply be given to research participants after minimal directions and can be taken where no cameraperson could venture—from the head of dogs running in the park, to the chest of skydivers. As Brown and Lackova write in Chapter 22, wearable cameras allow researchers to “be there” without necessarily being there, thus opening up a wide array of research avenues, especially for the development of mobile methodologies. Options and possibilities expand even further into relatively unchartered territory with Chapter 23. If action cameras mounted on land-animals or animals can give us a unique, morethan-human point of view, the same cameras (or similar ones) mounted on drones can give us viewpoints that only birds or aircraft could. As Adam Fish writes a drone’s “elevated optical

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platform provides a unique perspective on visual anthropology, the anthropology of cultures of media production, and the existential status of technologies and how they mediate non-human others” (Fish, this book). Many people unfortunately think of drones as toys of excess, but when used with good intent and a keen anthropological and geographic imagination camera drones can achieve remarkable goals. In his review of studies that have made use of camera drones Fish shows us how they have become powerful tools for community-based research projects monitoring ecologies, land use, and borders—serving in the process as key aids for the sake of activism and legal cases. Camera drones, Fish concludes, have thus enabled powerful ethnographies from the air, and of the air. If action cameras can allow us a frontal point of view, moving with the body or the head, and if drones can provide us with a downward perspective, 360° video can give us an all-around orientation that is as immersive as mediated visuality can be. In reviewing the development of what he calls “immersive ethnography” in Chapter 24 Mark Westmoreland shows us how the freedom to look in any direction results in giving viewers an active role in the making of their own mediated experience. As he writes, by offering new ways of interfacing with recorded reality, 360° video “sits at the intersection of cinematic and VR innovation, presenting a new combination of technological affordances and limitations” that ethnographers need to consider carefully (Westmoreland, this book). In the last chapter of Part 5 Steffen Köhn takes the visual ethnographic realm of possibilities back closer to us, right back to our desktops, fingertips, and our laptops.As he shows in Chapter 25, our very computers, mobile phones, and tablets—the digital technologies closest to us every day—can be used, and have been used to produce some of the most intimate and revealing productions one can imagine. Screens like the desktop computer thus become not only a site for ethnographic research, but also a filming location serving for a mode of documentary filmmaking that reveals and relies on the poetics of everyday digital culture. In his detailed review Köhn goes on to identify three modes of this desktop-based way of making documentary: (1) films taking place on researchers’ desktop screens (2) “ethnographic machinimas” focusing on virtual worlds as sites of social immersion, and (3) videos portraying research participants’ digital media practices and user experiences. As he concludes, given the communicative technological power available in our hands it is a pity that most social scientists so seldom use the multimodal tools they have to share their research, choosing instead to rely so much on traditional textual mediation.

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22 MOBILE VIDEO METHODS AND WEARABLE CAMERAS Katrina M. Brown and Petra Lackova

Recent years have seen an explosion in the popular use of wearable camera technology (WCT), paralleled by a growing interest in its use for ethnographic research. Once the niche preserve of adventure filmmakers and elite surveillance professionals, various forms of miniature cameras have evolved quickly to become lighter, cheaper, higher resolution, and more user-friendly, and as such have become part of what Chalfen (2014) calls the “capture everything” culture that infuses “new media.” Action cameras such as the GoPro have come to dominate the market at this point, but other products such as glasses-mounted camera, more-than-audiovisual, lifelogging devices, and ever-more-inventive smartphone mounts, all speak to a growing imperative to have the possibility of intimately entwining a video camera with one’s body to be able to follow and be in the thick of the action. Experimentation with DIY wearable video cameras took place in the sports and adventure filmmaking industries throughout the 1960’s, 1970’s, and 1980’s and often entailed attaching comically cumbersome camera equipment to sporting bodies and equipment (Dickinson, 1982).This style of shooting has become increasingly entangled in networks of viewing pleasure, entertainment, and profit ever since, from Hollywood to YouTube, with the visual cultures surrounding extreme sport still driving the technological advances and capacities of WCT (Bégin, 2016). Substantial use of wearable cameras has also become common in areas of surveillance, policing, monitoring, and pedagogical reflection across a range of industries (Sandhu, 2017), as well in the form of “crittercam” in wildlife documentaries (Haraway, 2008). Since wearable video cameras became available to buy off the shelf, their rise in popularity has been meteoric, and they can now be mounted not just on helmets and heads but also cars, bikes, skis, surf boards, parachutes, and even animals. Central to the seduction of WCT is giving a sense of a first-hand, intimate, immersive experience of such hyper-mobility; the camera seems to be “going-along,” doing what the wearer does, going where they go, and getting up close, all with the intrepidity, stamina, and stomach for boredom that would push even the most hardened human cameraperson. This in turn creates a sense of novelty and exploring frontiers of space, time, and bodily possibility, particularly in relation to high-skill, risky activities that a viewer may be unlikely to experience for themselves.

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Wearable cameras: from adventure filmmaking to adventurous researching This sense of “being there” is also what drew ethnographers to begin experimenting with WCT (Brown et al., 2008; Laurier, 2010; Brown and Spinney, 2010; Spinney, 2011), even as most acknowledged that such feelings of co-presence were an impression audiovisualities gave of social practices rather than any objective, universal truth. Researchers have been experimenting with wearable cameras in ethnographic endeavours ever since models became commercially available, and to date have used them to study a range of practices such as those related to driving (Laurier, 2010), cycling (Spinney, 2011, 2015; Brown and Spinney, 2010; Latham and Wood, 2015), flying (Vannini, 2017), wheelchair use (Parent, 2016), infant buggy use (Clement and Waitt, 2017), and surfing (Evers, 2015). Studies have considered indoors as well as outdoors (Kinsley et al. 2016), rural (Brown, 2017;Vannini and Stewart, 2017) as well as urban (Paterson and Glass, 2018; Duru, 2018), and have sought to engage the experiences of children as well as adults (Green, 2016) and animals as well as humans (Brown and Dilley, 2012).The ongoing appeal of wearable cameras for ethnographic work has tended to focus to varying degrees on the camera’s help in witnessing (see Lorimer 2010), evoking and situating particular spatio-temporal practices: i.e., bearing witness to the pace, rhythms, and geographies of often highly mobile, skilled, mundane, or dangerous practices, evoking the emotional, visceral, and multi-sensory experience of participants (often in ways that elude established linguistic means), and appreciating their situatedness in the fluid becomings of particular sociotechnical and ecological assemblages (e.g., Paterson and Glass, 2018; Spinney, 2011, 2015).The doing of the research can avoid eclipsing the doing of the practice being researched and thus enables sites of enquiry otherwise unavailable (Brown et al., 2008). Ethnographers have tended to mobilise wearable cameras in four, often interlaced, ways: 1. As an audiovisual form of fieldnotes that can serve as a mnemonic or record of the researcher’s own experience of field encounters, movements, more-than-verbal exchanges, relationships, events, and observations, upon which they typically reflect critically. 2. As a way of generating an audiovisual impression of situated, mobile practices, and more-thanhuman co-becomings as witnessed by the camera and its wearer, which are then mobilized for audiencing in a range of (public/private, individual/collective) ways and with the viewers’ responses woven back into the project findings to varying degrees.These could either (a) be directly edited into a networked audiovisual artefact such as a documentary1 or vlog or (b) become supplemented with discursive text, such as in various practices of elicitation and reflection. 3. As a reflexive tool to encourage those present during the video recording to elaborate further their various doings, thoughts, feelings, memories, and noticings. Participants and researchers typically use their viewing of the WCT footage to explore facets of the individual participant’s spatial and temporal experience, and often seek shared meanings and vocabularies for entanglements of motion, emotion, and corporeal, sensuous experiences that are usually difficult to convey in words (e.g., Spinney, 2011; also see Brown, 2017 and Paterson and Glass 2018 on haptic ways of knowing) or so habitual or internalized as to be deemed unnoteworthy (Brown and Spinney, 2010; Clement and Waitt, 2017). 4. As an empathy-building or relationship-building tool, where the video footage is shared with people typically not present during recording—or differently situated therein—in order to be affected by the evoked experience of another with the ultimate aim of better grasping underappreciated aspects of each other’s lives and practices, and generating more collaborative knowledges of a place or issue of mutual concern (Sumartojo and Pink, 2017). 238

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Clips from wearable cameras can be screened directly in collective elicitation and processbuilding forums,2 or become woven into further audio-visual articulations such as digital storying artefacts.3 These early forays suggest there is much untapped potential and even the likelihood that one day WCT will just be considered a standard ethnographic tool (Vannini, 2017). However, cautions relating to wearable cameras have also been identified and thus far too little explored (Brown and Banks, 2014; Duru, 2018; Haraway, 2008). Image making is always caught up in particular sociotechnical assemblages and visual cultures, and is thus suffused with power—dynamics which shape profoundly who or what is made visible and how (see Haraway, 1991; Rose, 2016). This means that this tool’s journey to greater ethnographic ubiquity must be accompanied by more critical attention to the agencies of WCT visualities as relational achievements with particular socioecological effects.We thus seek in the remainder of this chapter to parse the capacities and propensities that wearable cameras invite into sites of ethnographic image production and look more closely at their specific contingencies.We do this by drawing on our own part played in ethnographic experimentation with WCT.

Journeys in ethnography with wearable cameras: our experience Mobile video ethnography Our methodological journey with mobile video ethnography cameras began in a study of outdoor recreation conflicts with attempts to extend the “go-along” walking methods (Kusenbach, 2003) to practices of mountain biking. Even where the researchers could catch up with participants after sections of fast, technical, and risky manoeuvres or rough terrain and narrow tracks, the nature and mood of the research space was less conducive to deep and sustained reflection-whilst-doing.At the time (the early 2000’s), the first commercial miniaturized action “headcams” were becoming available.These models were clunky, heavy, unreliable, unintuitive, and produced poor image quality by today’s standards.Yet we wondered whether they could help us extend by proxy these moments of co-presence that we had felt when we moved side by side together with participants in the field.At the very least we hoped the rough audio-visual account of the activity would trigger memories, sensations, and feelings surrounding the experience which we could talk about further, and give a way in to verbalizing aspects conveyed as important through non-verbal articulations.As our research evolved to include dogwalking ethnographies, using an embodied video camera allowed the human-nonhuman animal partnership to focus on each other and wider ecologies in a way that was more characteristic of their usual dogwalks without interference from the researcher.These experiences have consolidated into a three-stage approach of (1) biographical background interview, wearable video-recorded outing, and (3) a review and reflect interview in which participant and researcher watch the footage together and work towards shared sense-making of the footage (see Brown and Banks, 2014 for more detail).

Collaborative documentary In our transdisciplinary project concerning contested environmental knowledge practices we conducted go-along and independent forms of mobile video ethnography using GoPro cameras with crofters, their livestock, and working dogs, ecologists, and policy and third sector representatives in order to find out more about different scientific, land management, and policy 239

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ways of knowing upland grasslands. Our case study focused on extensive common grazings on the Trotternish Ridge on the Isle of Skye.The GoPro footage served in an elicitation capacity in a series of workshops, along with interactive Touchtable technology and ecological surveys, in order to stimulate discussion on the sociomaterial and spatial constitution of various land management practices, and allow exploration of the commonalities and tensions. It was deemed too difficult to watch to constitute the sole content for a stand-alone film, so we edited it together with interviews and practices shot by a researcher with a digital single-lens reflex camera (DSLR) to produce the final documentary film Grazing on the Edge which was screened numerous times to local community audiences and all tiers of policy and government, before being made available online (https://vimeo.com/194534623).

Three key capacities of wearable video cameras The first key capacity of WCT is its ease of embody-ability; the way the camera can be readily, securely, and relatively comfortably affixed to a body, object, or more often, a body already prostheticized (e.g., with shoes, clothes, bike, phone, dog-lead).This is fundamental to the dual sense of closeness and perspective that wearable cameras are known and valued for. But there are numerous choices to make regarding the precise ways to embody a wearable camera, and a number of questions that ethnographers seeking to work with such visualities must address. One can argue that wearables cameras have distinct fields of vision in comparison to other kinds of handheld, tripod-mounted, or drone-mounted cameras (Garrett and Hawkins, 2014 after Daniels, 1993), but what is less acknowledged is that the precise body-spaces and ways of enrolling wearables can produce very different fields of vision (and indeed sound), very different experiences of how it feels to wear and move with the camera, and crucially in turn very different implications for who and what is made visible, audible, and how. In order to address the inescapable power relations working through visualities stressed by Haraway (1991, 2008) and Rose (2016), we must consider deeply how the corporeal presences, absences, motive forces, and bodily expression of subject-objects are made visually and aurally available to the camera by the witting or unwitting enrolment of various participants, techniques, technical accoutrements, and visual cultures. Most obviously we must ask ourselves who (or what) is to wear the camera? Whether the camera is worn by researcher and/or participant, human and/or nonhuman participants, animate or inanimate entities matters for who and what will be registered in the visual and aural fields of the camera, and how. Our default was to invite the principal human participant(s) to wear the camera so that they could be prompted to talk us through their experience whilst watching the footage at a later date.We were most interested in parsing their experience of that particular choreography of place, time, movement, sensation, and affect. However, reflecting also on the footage shot from animals with which the viewing humans were involved also seemed to open up extra avenues for them to articulate how their relationship with the nonhuman was experienced and negotiated. Interestingly, more managerial participants (e.g., farmers, foresters, rangers, policy makers) often felt more comfortable to be in “show and tell” mode and preferred the researcher to come along to wear the camera so we could “see” what they were actively presenting to us. A question more rarely considered in discussions of video methods is who or what is registered in the camera’s aural field and how. Who is to be heard, and how clearly? We found a GoPro would generally pick up the wearer’s speech audibly (as long as we didn’t use the fully waterproof casing) but not their companions in any reliable way.This raised questions of which sounds we privilege. For example, was it right to privilege a crofter’s speech over the squelch of his welly-boot through boggy ground? Which sounds affect the viewer most or in which 240

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ways? Which sounds have unintentional agency? The rustle of jackets and flapping of rucksack straps when using lapel mics or chest-cam, not to mention the wind roar, were a particularly unwelcome source of soundtrack additions when trying to decipher the words of a participant. Once a wearer is selected, it still matters where on the body the camera will be attached for how comportment, speed, and directional forces will work on the camera and its aural and visual fields. WCT features an ever-expanding range of specific mounts that allow the camera to be positioned in myriad ways, including the head, helmet, chest, pole, bike, pram, or vehicle. In our early ethnographic experiments, we used the head-mount almost exclusively, partly for reasons of image stabilization since heads are usually one of the steadiest parts of the body whilst in motion, but also because we wanted to enrol the specific agency of head-movements and related fields of view to help evoke what participants were attending to.With the commercial availability of the less conspicuous “chest-cam” mount, however, it soon became the preferred choice of participants, particularly walkers who, unlike mountain bikers, had no established visual cultures of wearable cameras.They liked that a chest-mounted camera “was more comfy and easier for me to forget about, and for other people too” (Nichola), although we felt it gave a more muted engagement with the way bodies articulate attention and intentionality.“Headcam” and “chestcam” are currently the most popular mount positions in research and popular culture, but are only a small drop in the ocean of the fields of vision that can be mobilized in ethnography.We found viewers of Grazing on the Edge had their usual human perspective of grazing practices hugely troubled and humbled by the inclusion of clips of “sheep-cam” and “dog-cam”, since viewing demanded new more-than-human ways of seeing and attending (Brown and Lackova, in preparation). We found different participants differently situated wearable cameras with respect to established visual cultures. Some participants associated the cameras with cultures of surveillance, whether casting themselves as the surveying power—such as the dogwalker who said “I don’t want to seem like I’m spying on my friends and neighbours,” or the researcher or other viewers as someone who might judge moral or legal wrongdoing, such as crofters worrying about urbanite viewers wrongly judging practices of animal welfare. Other participants—particularly mountain bikers—worried about generating footage that was “too boring” in comparison to established expectations of extreme sport WCT use. Some even admitted to feeling pressure to ride harder or faster to play up to what Vannini and Stewart (2017) term the “GoPro gaze,” which connotes particular WCT visualities with adventurous engagements of the world. This suggests how participants can become caught up in associated masculinist, able-bodied notions of what counts as appropriate movement outdoors and how bodies ought to mingle with “nature” (see also Evers, 2015). Others found the cameras somewhat bemusing as if they had no ready or singular cultural reference point. The second key capacity of WCT is staying-with the body-object whilst in motion, despite numerous frictions of space, time, and the environment.The wearable camera is unique in the way that it can be readily moved to simultaneously track and register bodily movement— from the subtlest of gestures to the most epic of journeys—to produce particular audio-visual impressions. Not only could our camera conjoin with a walker for six hours on peaks of the Cairngorms, it could convey to varying degrees an audio-visual sense of the gradient (e.g., evoked through visual angles and both sounds and chest rising and falling of hard breathing) and roughness of the terrain (e.g., jerky motion blur and yelp that accompanies a slip or a trip), exposure to the elements (drips of rain on the lens or the sound of a voice whipped away by the wind), the rhythms of stepping, eating, drinking, navigating, and view appreciation. The degree of responsiveness to corporeal micro-movements and expression is one of the most unique and most underappreciated capacities of wearable cameras. Clearly it depends 241

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precisely on the spatialities, velocities, arcs, and smoothness made possible by the body part to which the camera is attached.Yet,WCT is held to speak to more-than-representational, corporeal sensitivities and sensations as a generator of “somatic images” that “preserve the trace of a prediscursive recording” (Bégin, 2016, p. 11).The camera moves to some degree as the wearer moves (e.g., registers the wearer’s shifting position, comportment, and reflexes when climbing a rock or landing a jump) which is distinct from most handheld styles of shooting where the operator often seeks to minimize their own bodily movement so as not to distract from the matter of most concern. Film is already acknowledged to incorporate a haptic visuality (Marks, 2000) whereby the act of viewing invokes a tactile, sensuous, and more-than-visual experience, but with WCT we appeal even further to the potentials of video to attend to neglected kinaesthetic and proprioceptive dimensions of experience (Glass and Paterson, 2018). Certainly, the WCT footage was viscerally suggestive of aspects of the “ground-feel” (Brown, 2017) of walking and mountain biking in hills, woodland, and beyond, conveying a sense of the liveliness of the terrain and the sharp reflexes and muscularity required to respond to roots, rocks, bumps, jumps, and judders and vibrations.A core dilemma with wearable cameras, however, is that this responsiveness of the camera to the movement of body-with-terrain can also make WCT footage very difficult or unpleasant to watch. Neither is watchability a fixed property of WCT audiovisual materials, since it depends to some degree on the viewer’s familiarity with the practice and associated visual cultures. The distribution of agency in WCT filming is different to most established modes of handheld video recording.With the latter the operator tends to point the camera towards the subject and setting of interest, continually mindful of framing and composing the shot according to what is seen through the viewfinder, turning the record button on and off for the duration of the processes of interest. In this way the operator continually and actively bounds the spaces and times they deem of consequence. In comparison,WCT seems a very passive, opportunistic, and unbounded form of filming.Who or what is actually calling the shots here? A human “director” (in our case largely the researcher) still bounds the overall practice, place, and wearer of interest but, in contrast to other experiments in peripatetic video (Pink, 2007;Witmore, 2004), once the camera is running, it stays running for one long clip (batteries and file storage capacity allowing), and once the camera is mounted in a particular position on the body, a set field of “view from” remains available for the duration of the recording. The camera seems then to be given relative autonomy. Yet the camera being mobile, not motile, still borrows or relies on the motive force of the body—and indeed the terrain, gravity, momentum, and frictions moving and prompting the body to which it is attached—to make interesting fields of view available to it, and it is definitively undiscerning about what exactly is interesting, as it will record everything made available to its lens and sensor. Most agency then appears to be bestowed upon wearers as, in principle, they control their body’s movement. A dogwalker can decide their route through the forest, a biker can decide how they “soak up” or “huck off ” a bump, and a hillwalker can decide what they turn their head to look at. Such agency can be limited, nonetheless, by difficulties in the participant knowing or changing what the camera is “seeing” once they are in the flow of their practice. Just because in some regards wearable cameras allow a “less selective mode of recording” (Garrett and Hawkins, 2014, p. 149), it does not mean it is more objective.We must resist any temptation to treat c as wholly autonomous as if no decision needs to be made, just as we must resist the temptation to conflate the POV footage shot by a person with their perspective. One participant joked to one of us in the middle of a GoPro-recorded dog walk “Who is the director of this film anyway?”, laughing and pointing to us, herself (sporting chest-cam), the forest, and her dog who was continually inviting her into the undergrowth to find sticks to throw. 242

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Indeed, the co-ingredience of participants, researchers, and camera settings with vegetation, textured terrain, and elemental and cosmic forces, not to mention the circuits of imagery and commodities that made up associated visual cultures, serves to cast any idea of the resulting footage being a singular “Point of View” as faintly ludicrous.The researcher must therefore be very clear where their agency can be exerted and altered, and seek to become as literate as possible in how camera recruitment, positioning, settings, and accessorizing (e.g., lens angle, colour grade, resolution, mount, casing, external mic set-up) affects what is made visible and audible, and how. The third key capacity of WCT is the potentially generative form of promiscuity, stemming from its radically dynamic embodiment possibilities, which may chime with promiscuous, lively multiplicities and complexity of more-than-human becomings (Haraway, 2008). In short, its hyper-mobility enables a kind of multi-sited, hyper-encounterability.The dual ability of wearable cameras to become-with the intimate and the ambulant, together with the sense the audio-visualities engender of being situated in the flux and flow of unfolding encounters and emergent relations, opens up possibilities for following traces (Latour, 2005) or staying with trouble (Haraway 2008, 2016) that were previously difficult or impossible to achieve. For example, the privilege of the camera to conjoin and journey with the body of a crofter gathering sheep from the Trotternish Ridge on the Isle of Skye, and for the resulting audiovisual impression to be shown later at a workshop and then documentary screening, allowed researchers and others (from local civil servants to members of Parliament) to be instantly and forcefully struck by the connections that were traced between the well-known “fact” and policy problem of insufficient opportunity for young people in agriculture, and the visceral, muscular, and emotional struggle of a man “too old” to be in the “young man’s game” [sic] of herding sheep for two days across epic, rugged, unforgiving, mountainous terrain six times a year. The incorporation of video made using WCT into a decades-long debate was widely noted as changing completely the atmosphere and urgency surrounding the issue, and in part contributed to breaking a longstanding deadlock between the crofters and environment agency regarding the implementation of a management agreement for that common grazings. Here WCT provided an opportunity to differently appreciate and situate the accomplishment of particular linkages and separations. In particular, it made visible connections between the typically obscured, day—to-day fleshy, emotional experience of crofters managing the grazing agency of livestock, and the maps, surveys, payments, and other apparatus of environmental governance.

Conclusion The distinct contribution of wearable video cameras to ethnographic endeavour is fundamentally underpinned by their consummate ease of mobile co-becoming.WCT has unique abilities to affix, entangle, and journey conjointly with (even fast, flighty, and highly skilled) moving subject-objects wherever and however they go, and make audio-visual impressions of their spatio-temporal practices as they co-constitute with a multitude of other more-than-human entities.The growing number of ethnographers exploring the promise of wearable cameras for research have identified some key ways in which this mingling of motion pictures with bodies in motion invites novel ways of being-with, reflecting on, and being affected by participants, whilst broadening out who and what counts as a participant. Unlike established handheld or tripodmounted filming approaches, researchers using wearable cameras often seek to channel the corporeal agency and situatedness of the subject-object doing the filming rather than minimize it. This noteworthy departure in ways of enrolling a camera is a tantalizing prospect for the ethnographer whose task has long included providing rich accounts of social worlds from the point of view of particular subjects, but who has perhaps been imaginatively constricted by the 243

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traditional ethnographic roles of cameras as quiet observers. Whilst mainstream cameras and filming techniques may produce audio-visualities that are more palatable and easier to watch (and hear),WCT footage is remarkable in the rawness of the impression it gives. In contrast to the impression of composure and coherence found in most ethnographic film,WCT conveys a world that is rough and ready, breathless, sweaty and trembling, and often brimming with myriad atmospheres from frustration or boredom to elation or contentment. Although this scrappiness is undoubtedly a challenge for the audiencing of WCT footage, we suggest here that the hypermobility and hyper-encounterability of wearable cameras are precisely the qualities that could aid the quest to engage with the messy, fluid, promiscuous, multi-sited becomings that configure particular more-than-human relations (Haraway, 2008; Latour, 2005). Moreover, the possibilities of WCT to foreground more somatic ways of engaging such worlds have only just begun to be acknowledged (Brown, 2017; Paterson and Glass, 2018; Spinney, 2011). However, as with the mobilization of any visualities (Haraway, 1991; Rose, 2016), any promise of getting into the thick of more-than-human embroilment by video camera-proxy must be tempered by keeping a critical eye on the power relations articulated through mobile, first-hand, body-camera ways of seeing and the scopic regimes associated with such intimate visualising technologies (see also Duru, 2018). The precise ways in which we enrol wearable camera technologies matters deeply for who or what is made visible/audible or invisible/inaudible, to whom, where, and how.And more could be done to ponder the implications for research of the surveillance, extreme sport, and wildlife entertainment lineage and associations of WCT. This means problematizing the notion of being there that WCT has become celebrated for and think in critical ways about where the “there” of being there actually is, or rather how impressions of the multiple sites of there are relationally achieved. Even questions of who the filmmaker is and what their agenda might be are not straightforward to address. Rather we must examine who-what is filming and which bits of bodies, configurations of apparatus, and styles of movement are involved and in what ways are they making a difference. Given that wearable cameras are likely to be an ever-more common part of life and qualitative research, we need to get to grips with the ways in which particular corporeal, ecological, technological, and optical agencies are invited, channelled, combined, and resisted to generate particular audio-visual impressions, and at once particular affective and ethical relations. We therefore call for more explicit attention to be paid to the minutiae of video ethnographic assemblages, such as their possible configurations of human and/or animal bodies, camera models, mounts and settings, movements and techniques, terrains, textures and atmospheres, in order to trace the capacities thus bestowed upon wearable cameras to particular senses of subject-objects and their situatedness.

Notes 1 Most notably Leviathan (2012) by Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel which was shot entirely with a GoPro. 2 As we did in workshops for the project TRANSGRASS: https://www.hutton.ac.uk/research/projects/ TRANSGRASS 3 As we are currently doing with digital storymapping in the project UNDERSTORY: https://www. hutton.ac.uk/research/projects/understory-storying-woodland-use-management-and-expansion-cair ngorms

References Bégin, R. (2016). GoPro:Augmented bodies, somatic images. In D. Chateau and J. Moure (Eds.), Screens (pp. 107–115). Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

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Mobile video methods and wearable cameras Brown, K., & Spinney, J. (2010). Catching a glimpse: The value of video in evoking, understanding and representing the practice of cycling. In B. Fincham, M. McGuinness, & L. Murray (Eds.), Mobile methodologies (pp. 130–151). Aldershot: Ashgate. Brown, K., & Dilley, R. (2012). Ways of knowing for ‘response-ability’ in more-than-human encounters: The role of anticipatory knowledges in outdoor access with dogs. Area, 44, 37–45. Brown, K. M., Dilley, R., & Marshall, K. (2008). Using a head-mounted video camera to understand social worlds and experiences.Sociological Research Online,13(6).31-40 Retrieved from http://www.socresonline. org.uk/13/6/1.html Brown, K. M., & Banks, E. (2014). Close encounters: Using mobile video ethnography to understand human-animal relations. In C. Bates (Ed.), Video methods: Social science research in motion (pp. 95–120). London: Routledge. Brown, K. M. (2017).The haptic pleasures of ground-feel:The role of textured terrain in motivating regular exercise. Health and Place, 46, 307–314. Brown, K.M. & Lackova, P. (in press) Doing multispecies ethnography with mobile video: Exploring animal-human contact zones, in Colombino,A. & Steinkrüger, J. (eds.) Methods in human-animal studies: the question(s) of the animal(s) in practice, Routledge Human-Animal Studies Series, London: Routledge. Chaflen, R. (2014).Your panopticon or mine? Incorporating wearable technology’s glass and GoPro into visual social science. Visual Studies, 29(3), 299–310. Clement, S., & Waitt, G. (2017). Walking, mothering and care: A sensory ethnography of journeying onfoot with children in Wollongong,Australia. Gender, Place and Culture, 24(8), 1185–1203. Daniels, S. (1993). Fields of vision: Landscape imagery and national identity in England and the United States. Cambridge: Polity Press. Dickinson, L. (1982). Filming the impossible. London: Jonathan Cape. Duru,A. (2018).Wearable cameras, in-visible breasts: Intimate spatialities of feminist research with wearable camcorders in Istanbul. Gender, Place and Culture, 25(7), 939–954. Evers, C. (2015). Researching action sport with a GoPro™ camera: An embodied and emotional mobile video tale of the sea, masculinity and men-who-surf. In I. Wellard (Ed.), Researching embodied sport: Exploring movement cultures (pp. 145–163). London: Routledge. Garrett, B. L., & Hawkins, H. (2014). Creative video ethnographies. In C. Bates (Ed.), Video methods: Social science research in motion (pp. 142–64). London: Routledge. Green, C. (2016). Sensory tours as a method for engaging children as active researchers: Exploring the use of wearable cameras in early childhood research. International Journal of Early Childhood, 48(3), 277–294. Haraway, D. J. (1991). Simians, cyborgs, and women:The reinvention of nature. London: Free Association Books. Haraway, D. J. (2008). When species meet. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Kinsley, K. M., Schoonover, D., & Spitler, J. (2016). GoPro as an ethnographic tool: A wayfinding study in an academic library. Journal of Access Services, 13(1), 7–23. Kusenbach, M. (2003). Street phenomenology: The go-along as ethnographic research tool. Ethnography, 4, 455–485. Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network theory. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Latham, A., & Wood, P. R. (2015). Inhabiting infrastructure: Exploring the interactional spaces of urban cycling. Environment and Planning A, 47(2), 300–319. Laurier, E. (2010). Being there/seeing there: Recording and analysing life in the car. In B. Fincham, M. McGuinness, & L. Murray (Eds.), Mobile methodologies (pp. 103–117). Aldershot: Ashgate. Lorimer, J. (2010) Moving image methodologies for more-than-human geographies. Cultural Geographies, 17(2): 237-258. Marks, L. (2000). The skin of the film. Intercultural cinema, embodiment, and the senses. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Parent, L. (2016).The wheeling interview: Mobile methods and disability. Mobilities, 11(4), 521–532. Paterson, M., & Glass, M. R. (2018). Seeing, feeling, and showing ‘bodies-in-place’: Exploring reflexivity and the multisensory body through videography. Social and Cultural Geography, 21(1), 1-24. Pink, S. (2007).Walking with video. Visual Studies, 22(3), 240–252. Rose, G. (2016).Visual Methodologies:An Introduction to Interpreting Visual Materials. London: Sage. pp. 456 Sandhu, A. (2017). ‘I’m glad that was on camera’: A case study of police officers’ perceptions of cameras. Policing and Society, 29(2), 223–235.

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23 DRONES Adam Fish

There is a fable told by a mountain people living in the ancient highlands of New Guinea about a race between a snake and a bird. It tells of a contest which decided if men would be like birds, and die, or be like snakes and shed their skin and have eternal life.The bird won and from that time all men, like birds, must die. Robert Gardner (1963) So begins the classic film Dead Birds (1963), a semi-fictional story of the cycles of life, death, revenge, self-defense, and self-destruction in the highlands of Papua New Guinea. The film’s director, Robert Gardner, speaks these words over a long and smooth tracking shot of a whiteheaded hawk gliding above the jungle. Next, the opening credits appear and we are on the all-too-human Earth, amongst moaning, grieving Dani people.This is the beginning of a death ceremony—a death that must be responded to with retributive killing of the Dani’s enemy tribe—and the renewing of the cycle of vengeance. But before the revenge-seeking bird-people we are with the living, soaring bird. From our perspective, somehow, somewhere, the cameraperson is above the bird, above the forest canopy, and for a moment above the fray of the human drama unfolding below. Birds, like other subjects at home in the atmosphere, hail audiences to feel vertiginous heights and gaseous motility.The atmospheric camera perspective is both literally ungrounded—an image of a floating bird as seen from an elevated netherworld—and sets the stage for the film, providing a geographical overview and situatedness to the scenes that follow.The hawk and the camera person, both elevated and above the fray, are fused. Like the pigeons used for surveillance photography in World Wars I and II, this hybrid of bird and camera insinuates the insights of this chapter: humans and other non-humans collaborating to produce a specific kind of knowledge from the air. There exists useful epistemological information in this evocative clip: the vertical view shows us where the Dani are in space.The opening clip is a literal overview providing a look at a dominant leitmotif in the film and in Dani society: the continuity of killing and revenge.There is an ontological statement made about three things: the nature of birds, the existence of cinematography, and the beingness of the Dani. Birds soar, glide, and, like men, die; cinematography takes a bird’s-eye-perspective on cultural activity, attempting synthesis and simplification of the complex world below; and the Dani, in this interpretation, are driven by ontological concerns, e.g., the defending of existential boundaries, and other core values of their culture. In this opening shot 247

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of Dead Birds, we find a parallel for the epistemologies, ethnographies, and ontologies surrounding unmanned aerial vehicles or over-the-counter drones equipped with high-definition still and moving picture cameras and other remote sensing payloads1.This elevated optical platform provides a unique perspective on visual anthropology, the anthropology of cultures of media production, and the existential status of technologies and how they mediate non-human others. A visual anthropology from the atmosphere focuses on visual production that occurs from the atmospheric or vertical vantage point. If a visual anthropology of the atmosphere is looking up, a visual anthropology from the atmosphere is looking down. Archaeologists for example use drones to make maps and so too do Indigenous and activist drone communities in Peru, Guyana, Panama, and Indonesia who use drones to peer on the forest and mining developments in their districts (Paneque-Gálvez et al., 2017). As a project participant writes, the drones are an “antiland-grabbing device” (Radjawali et al., 2017, p. 818). Drone activists monitor human ecologies: village gardens, expanding bauxite and illegal gold mining, palm oil plantations, and other concessions to corporations. In the process, a culture of media production and digital activism forms around monitoring, mapping, and building legal arguments from the atmosphere. Finally, this is a visual anthropology with the air. The atmosphere is a mix of gases that provides the weight against which to lift, glide, drift, and thrust. The drone becomes with the atmosphere, its winds, funnels, uplifts, and downdrafts.With other objects in the air, the drone is intertwined; it is tethered to electronic power and an electromagnetic link. It is connected to the Earth, pilot, and subjects below. This being-with is techno-ontological (Kittler, 2009): the simultaneity of materiality, elementality, and subjectivity. To illustrate this point, I reflexively analyze our drone documentary, Points of Presence (Fish et al., 2017), which maps three undersea fiber-optical cables between Iceland and London. It is a visual anthropology looking down from the drone as much as looking into the drone technology, the elements, and non-human others. I situate this chapter within an atmospheric anthropology which includes the atmosphere as a medium for epistemological projects and methodological experimentation, the ethnography of new technologies of the air by cultures of media production, and the ontological conception of these airborne technologies—elementally suspended extensions of bodies at the edge of the internet.

Ethnographies of the air “It might be a Scottish name, taken from a story about two men on a train. One man says,‘What’s that package up there in the baggage rack?’And the other answers,‘Oh, that’s a MacGuffin.’ The first one asks, ‘What’s a MacGuffin?’ ‘Well,’ the other man says, ‘it’s an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands.’ The first man says, ‘But there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands,’ and the other one answers, ‘Well then, that’s no MacGuffin!’ So you see that a MacGuffin is actually nothing at all. Alfred Hitchcock, 1939 The Maltese falcon in John Huston’s 1941 The Maltese Falcon,“Rosebud” in Orson Well’s 1941 Citizen Kane, the Holy Grail in the 1975 Monty Python’s The Holy Grail—these are examples of MacGuffins: objects of material culture which do not matter to film audiences but around which drama unfolds. In an anthropology of the atmosphere, MacGuffins include the Palapa satellite and the nationalistic discourses in Indonesia it inspired (Barker 2005) and the construction of humanness an investigation into the planet Mars inspires (Valentine 2017).The satellite and other planets influence certain types of epistemological production.The drone is a MacGuffin and it is less important than the practices and discourses that circulate around it. 248

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Birds are also MacGuffins.They are a resource and symbol within Indigenous cultures, having long been a minor topic in ethnography, appearing in the litanies of historical particularism and symbolic anthropology. Consider Clifford Geertz (1973) and his reading of the symbolism of the rooster as a stand-in for men and social force in Bali. Seen cross-culturally, birds are specimens; protected and sacred; with rights, behaviors, songs, and agency.They are entangled with other species, techno-assemblages, and fates (Bowman, n.d.). In a compelling ethnography of endangered birds, van Dooren (2014) examines the entanglements of aves, technologies, people, and human’s ever-expanding web of influence. Like birds, drones are not entirely of the Earth or the atmosphere.They are suspended between nature and culture. Colin Jerolmack (2007) studies the pigeon as a hybrid entity, neither natural nor entirely cultural. Through its history, the pigeon has been designed for food and fertilizer, to be a messenger and racer, and exists as a symbol and source of leisure and pleasure.These selected traits result in the pigeon’s wide domestication and distribution—as well as its adaptability. During colonialism, the semi-domesticated pigeon traveled the world and then returned to a feral state, with all of the negative associations.This status, as a mix of natural traits and artificial selection, with a history of adaptation and manipulation, of being wild, then domesticated, and re-wilded in a compromised vertical urbanism—where adaptation for cliff-dwelling exploits the high-rise canyons of the city street—these qualities make the pigeon a hybrid.This anthropology of the bird sets the stage for a discussion of an anthropology of another airborne hybrid which is half-human, half more-than-human, and always subjected to the whims of the elements, the winds of culture, regulation, and trends in practice: the drone. An example of an anthropology of drones comes from Marcel LaFlamme (2017) who investigates “aviation media”: the necessary and contested media practices of pilots in North Dakota. The reticence of some pilots to use safety-enhancing transmission technologies challenges the plans of the state to court drone industries, an industry that requires every flying object to be identifiable.This oppositional position is best summarized in the euphemism,“Airplanes fly by the laws of Bernoulli, not Marconi” (LaFlamme, 2017, p. 690). With Daniel Bernoulli being a mathmatician of fluid dynamics and Guglielmo Marconi an inventor of radio telegraphy, this quote means that the principles of flight, not of the electromagnetic spectrum rule the air. or LaFlamme the fuselage is a MacGuffin around which epistemologies that constitute knowledge and proper practice circulate. These anthropological studies into birds and drones provide epistemologies or ways of knowing the atmosphere. Here, birds and drones are MacGuffins objects around which knowledge is produced through collective technological efforts and creative ideals. A closer look at a specific kind of culture that epistemology allows is necessary.

Epistemologies of the atmosphere Drones are cultural objects but also tools for anthropologists, scientists, and activists. Drone cultures form through practices performed from the elevated perspective provided by atmospheric platforms. My key example includes the production of cultures of media activism surrounding the building of maps and monitoring projects in Southeast Asia, Central America, and South America. First, however, because this section is about how cultures and cultural theories form in the air, we briefly look at how one disciplinary culture, archaeology, uses atmospheric platforms.

Drone archaeology The utility of the aerial viewpoint has been prized in archaeology. Frost marks accumulate on various subterranean features, buried ditches hold differences in water retention, shadow249

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marks index elevation changes, living surfaces modulate along with soil colors. Each can best be recorded from the air, thus the view-from-above provides archaeologists with insights into manipulations of landscapes unseen by the terrestrial eye.The Nazca lines in southern Peru are a vivid example of the benefits of vertical vision.Virtually indecipherable from the ground, the immensity of these geoglyphs become suddenly evident from an airplane. Historian Paul Kosok was the first to fly over the Nazca lines, recognizing in the 1940’s that these strange indentations were not trails but the shapes of birds and other icons (University of Texas Archival Resource, n.d.). Called “space archaeology” by Egyptologist Sarah Parcak (2009), the satellites have identified urban and large ceremonial complexes in Peru, Iran, Egypt, and in Italy. NASA archaeologist Tom Sever (1999) uses satellites to identify settlements, population densities, canals, and transportation infrastructures in the Petén region of northern Guatemala. Using pulses of light that penetrate jungles and accurately measure distances, it is possible to build high-resolution topographical maps and identify monumental complexes such as those at Carocol, Belize (Chase et al., 2010). Like airplane, satellite, and other types of atmospheric archaeology, drones offer specific types of remote sensing from the air. Drones flown from lower elevation with high-definition cameras and other remote sensing payloads offer high-resolution images. Easier to deploy and less expensive than satellites or airplanes, drones offer a democratization of atmospheric remote sensing. Archaeologists use drones to measure differences in topography (Gutiérrez et al., 2016), photograph rock art (Mark and Billo, 2016), map settlements (Meyer et al., 2016; Parcero-Oubiña et al., 2016), build terrain models (Baliño, 2016), and rapidly collect data on threatened sites (Harrison-Buck et al., 2016). The application of drones goes beyond anthropology to include politically motivated forms of mapping and counter-mapping—or the production of alternative cultural boundaries.

Drone activism in the Global South In Indigenous hands drones are primarily used to monitor and map terrain from the air. In the process, alternative maps are created designating new boundaries of traditional lands and documenting environmental damage. Counter-mapping takes the map as a text, open to interpretation, susceptible to revision. A map is a tool for both power and counter-power. Countermapping projects are practices and discourses for a counter-hegemony. Counter-mapping projects are civic, participatory, and citizen-driven.They are political projects in geography that challenge spaces of inequality. Maps are marks, evidence of human disputes.They are culturally specific. Land-relations are concretized and formalized in maps. On the one hand, colonial and empirial projects demarcate title through such surveys and maps. For the duration of its preservation and physical endurance, a map freezes space, exposing space to management by the state. On the other hand, Indigenous movements are by definition local: historically, culturally, and linguistically rooted in places that transcend textualization. In this manner, the map may be a Western concept, imposing authority through form. But it may also be amenable to remix and the hybridization of Western precision and Indigenous connection. Either way, the map is a representation of a surround, an icon, an ideo-infrastructure, a portal, a translation. It is a draft, in the sense of writing, inscription, and legibility. In this manner, a drone is a stylo from the sky. The first experiments in drone activism were workshop-facilitated in Southeast Asia and South America.These activism-academic projects were conducted in Indonesia by Radjawali et al. (2017) with Indigenous Dayaks and in Peru, Panama, and Guyana by Panaque-Galvez et al. (2017).This is action research, or scholarly activism which includes drone building, theorizing, 250

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flying, reflection, data collection, and data application in projects of Indigenous sovereignty.The workshops are designed to ascertain to what extent Indigenous people can operate drone technologies and are also locations for ethnographic observations and conversations about technology and its relationship to environmental justice and land rights. Counter-mapping was invented in the forests of West Kalamantan, Indonesia in the 1990’s (Poluso, 1995).An early proponent of counter-mapping, Nancy Poluso, encouraged her participants from Borneo to sketch maps of their forest resources, homes, and villages. More recently, between 2011 and 2015, activists working with the Indigenous Tayan community blended counter-mapping and drones in the Kapuas River region of Kalamantan in order to document Indonesian government land concessions to a bauxite mine corporation (Radjawali et al., 2017). The Indigenous-piloted drones documented how the mine expanded to absorb the traditional land outside its borders, despoiling the forests with tailings ponds. In a first for Indonesia if not the world, the georeferenced maps were accepted as evidence by the Constitutional Court in Indonesia. From this success, a movement formed to challenge land concessions to mining and palm oil corporations. Indigenous communities in southern Peru have adopted drones in their activist countermapping exercises. In the Sierra Del Divisor of Peru, drones identified coca growers deforesting and encroaching on Indigenous Shipibo Conibo territory (Reynold, 2017). In the northern Peruvian Amazon lies the Kukama Kukairia Indigenous Territory. Here, in August of 2014, drones recorded oil extraction infrastructure, oil spills, and other ecological destruction. In the Harakmbut Indigenous region of the Peruvian Amazon, drones collected images of illegal gold mining. Illegal logging and deforestation were chronicled from the air within the Indigenous Embera-Wounaan territory of southern Panama. In neighboring Guyana, in the Wapichana and Mukushi Indigenous territory of the southern section of the state, drones documented illegal logging, mining, and deforestation (Panaque-Galvez et al., 2017, p. 5). This is a manifestation of Indigenous visual anthropology that builds massive orthomosaic maps of regions for use in projects of Indigenous survival. A drone workshop with 12 people from the Kukama Kukairia Indigenous Territory focused on mapping the forest along a pipeline as well as a sizable oil spill caused by a ruptured pipeline. From a height of 450m, with a drone equipped with a GoPro Hero3 and Mobius ActionCam RGB camera, the Skywalker fixed-wing plane scanned the Earth below. The pilot, equipped with a first-person point of view system, was linked to a durable laptop and the radiowave frequency of the electromagnetic spectrum, could see in the jungle below slash and burn agriculture, gardens, farms, clear-cuts, sold lots, and everything in-between. Eleven kilometers away they found a barren area radiating from the pipeline.They peered down on the tarry field, collecting numerous images and precise geographic information systems (GIS) data about this oil spill (Panaque-Galvez et al., 2017, p. 10). In the Embara-Wounaan region of Panama, drone counter-mapping participants came from the Puerto Indio, Bayamon, and Daipuru tribes. Their goals were to make detailed counter-maps of illegal deforestation resulting from cattle ranchers, illegal foresters, and settlers cutting and planting crops. These activities are easily recognizable if seen from above. Increasing their evidentiary worth, the coordinates for these maps were reinforced through terrestrial surveys and ground-truthing.While both a fixed-wing and a quadcopter conducted atmospheric surveys, two teams marched through the jungle and foggy openings in the canopy following coordinates given by the drone and its operator. In one instance they found a ranch four times larger than it should legally be.The map they produced would later be used in a court case to demand for greater protection of their hereditary rights to land (PanaqueGalvez et al., 2017). 251

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Atmospheric ontologies Where atmospheres and climate, birds and other airborne things, wind, weather, and off-planet potential come together, we see this as a test launch for meta-atmospheric perspectives. … These theoretical cartographies of space, sky, atmosphere, and air are moved by anthropology’s ongoing turn toward posthumanisms, ontologies, things, mattering, and new materialisms. Cymene Howe (2015, n.p.) Atmospheres and cultures of the air are recent interests within anthropology, connected both with atmospheric climate change and new technology for accessing the air such as drones. Following Howe’s suggestion, I focus on the ontological in the anthropology of the atmosphere. The drone is a tool with which to experiment within the atmospheric laboratory. It can be used to gather insights into the forces within which we are suspended and which give objects their material force.To illustrate this point, I will briefly reflect on my video, Points of Presence (Fish et al., 2017), about mapping the undersea fiber-optical system connecting Iceland to Europe through the United Kingdom and Denmark. Like the previously mentioned cases regarding the construction of aviation media in North Dakota and the visual media activism in Indonesia and Central America, this Points of Presence allowed researchers to witness how the atmosphere is a platform for visual cultural construction and its contestation. Underwater almost entirely and coming ashore buried by sand and concrete, the undersea fiber-optical system is hidden.The highly securitized and little staffed outposts for the internet are called points of presence, where multiterrabyte connections support millions of simultaneous packet requests. Our mapping methodology included locating these digital frontier spots and tracing the compass orientation with a drone.We flew the drone over the ocean, following the cable between information trading forts, above black sands and haybales as in Iceland, pilot whale waters surrounding the Faroe islands, and Nazi bunkers in Denmark to the central node for internet co-presence, the Telehouse, in the city of London. These experiments provided insights into five drone ontologies: extension, elementality, elevation, edge, and entanglement. The drone is an ideal type of sensorial extension by lengthening sight, touch, and electronic internetworking.The drone outspreads into the elements, prolongs human senses in an elevated sense, spreads the edge of the internet, and through these extensions becomes entangled with multispecies, multi-ecologies, and multi-technological forces. Perhaps the most important aspect of the drone is its capacity to mediate real time sense-data back to the body and networked computers. Using a WiFi connection, the camera works in parallel to the evolving subsurface megastructure that is the internet. It is tethered to the Earth, not only as an extension of the body but also a node within a sensorial feedback system at the ends of a planetary computer network. In navigating these elemental boundaries, the drone is positioned to mediate a looming hybridity of digital and organic information. A drone’s ontology is conditioned in flight by elementality, a term that describes how the medieval elements—Earth, air, water, fire—condition being (Clark, 2017). Drones most clearly inhabit a mix of atmospheric gases. Drone users extend their sense of sight through this air and use the atmosphere as a convenient element to move through between destinations and projects. The wireless connections utilize the electromagnetic spectrum which is itself a force that is exercised in the atmosphere. In this manner, the atmosphere is an infrastructure for the transmission and reception of information. Adding drones to this matrix increases atmospheric spaces of possibility. 252

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This air elementality allows for an ontology of elevation.A result of its atmospheric mobility, the drone comes into being through its ability to fly above the Earth in myriad directions but always up.This elevated floating vantage point allows for the optical analysis of spaces, landscapes, infrastructures, and other vast hyperobjects—entities such as the internet that are beyond our conceptualization and control (Morton, 2013). Scholars of infrastructure claim that efforts to visualize information infrastructure would necessarily politicize these objects, making us more responsible for them and the impact they have on conditioning sociality and impacting sustainability (Mattern, 2013; Parks, 2013). In this manner, visualizations from elevated positions have the potential to draw attention to otherwise little appreciated though essential infrastructures. Often the far distances we attempt to fly drones results in losses of connection between the controller and the drone. Quite regularly, the video feed from the drone to the mobile device connected to the remote controller will be lost.The image will freeze and turn black and white and a notification will inform the pilot that “connection has been lost.” Thus, drones have an edge ontology; they become with the limits and the liminality of the network. Drones, as elevated and elemental objects, are at the geographical edges of the internet of things. In this way, drones work at the brink of the digitally known.The North Atlantic region which we experimentally mapped in Points of Presence is very remote, underpopulated, and under-networked. The undersea cable may carry robust broadband capacity through these sparse islands but not for the communities living on the island.The drone, on the other hand, carries with it its own atmospheric connection. Thus, Points of Presence illustrates how new technologies engage with areas at the fringe of information globalization. The drone has a co-determining relationship with the objects—elements, other non-humans, and edges—alongside which it comes into being. Likewise, the mattering, programmatic, and ethical dimensions of the drone are interwoven with the messy practices of flying in elemental and social space. Drones become entangled with technologies, pilots, landscapes, and research subjects. Like pigeons and other beings transformed by contact with humans and ever-changing ecologies, drones are hybrids. Drones expose collective action, either social, scientific, or activistic. It helps in the building of knowledge about how the atmosphere is discursively produced. A drone is an atmospheric platform for the investigation of the concrescence of technologies, ontologies, and other species. It provides to anthropologists an experiential sensation of the atmosphere, its forces, and what is possible within it.

Conclusion It has been my intent for this brief chapter to objectify a new technology and show its anthropological possibility.The drones used by the scholars and activists described above are easy to learn to fly and relatively affordable and can be acquired for between $300 and $1,500.The majority of these over-the-counter civil drones are equipped with HD and 4K video cameras. As of 2019, drone regulation is rapidly developing to curb unscrupulous flights.Approximately 45 countries have passed laws regulating flight, 15 have banned drones, and several including the United States and the United Kingdom, are making drone registration compulsory (Dukowitz, 2018). Punitive fines, prison time, and drone confiscation can result from violations.While the ease of learning to navigate drones and their affordability may increase their popularity, drones’ potentials in anthropology, activism, conservation, and journalism may be curtailed by overzealous regulation. In terms of scholarship, it is important to synthesize the ethnographic, epistemological, and ontological to come to a more realistic notion of what the drone is, does, and why it matters.As a contribution to a handbook on ethnographic video it is productive to consider the drone not 253

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only as something with which to make visual depictions of cultural activity, but also as an object around which cultural activity occurs. Drones, either tethered to the hands of archaeologists or activists being studied by anthropologists, are uniquely transformative technologies capable of extending and elevating human and more-than-human senses to the edge of the internet and into entanglements with other forces and species.A visual anthropology that takes as a goal this synergy of epistemologies, ethnographies, and ontologies will generate holistic theory from a wide range of methodological encounters.

Note 1 Here I am not discussing military Predator or Reaper drones that cost millions of dollars, can hover for days, and are used for targeted assassination. I focus on smaller, relatively affordable civic drones connected to mobile phones, and usually carrying video capacities.

Works cited Baliño, I. H. (2016). Processing a detailed digital terrain model using photogrammetry and UAVs at Cerro de la Máscara, Sinaloa, Mexico. The Society for American Archaeology.The SAA Archaeological Record, 16(2), 25–29. Barker, J. (2005). Engineers and political dreams: Indonesia in the satellite age. Current Anthropology, 46(5), 703–727. Bowman, C. (n.d.).Towards an anthropology of birds: A critical review. Retrieved from https://www.aca demia.edu/9637206/Towards_An_Anthropology_of_Birds_A_Critical_Review Chase, A. F., Chase, D. Z.,Weishampel, J. F., Drake, J. B., Shrestha, R. L., Slatton, K. C., Awe, J. J., & Carter W. E. (2010). Airborne LiDAR, archaeology, and the ancient Maya landscape at Caracol, Belize. Journal of Archaeological Science, 38: 387-398. doi:10.1016/j.jas.2010.09.018 Clark, N. (2017). Anthropocene bodies, geological time, and the crisis of natality. Body and Science, 23(3): 156-180. Dukowitz, Z. (2018). No flying allowed:The 15 countries where drones are banned. UAV Coach. Retrieved from https://uavcoach.com/drone-bans/ Fish, A. Garrett, B. L., & Case, O. (2017). Drones caught in the Net. Imaginations: Journal of Cross-Cultural Images Studies, 8. Gardner, R. (1963). Dead birds.Watertown, MA: DER. Geertz, C. (1973). Notes on the Balinese cockfight in the interpretation of cultures. NY: Basic Books. Gutiérrez, G., Erny, G., Friedman, A., Godsey, M., & Gradoz, M. (2016). Archaeological topography with small unmanned aerial vehicles. The Society for American Archaeology.The SAA Archaeological Record, 16(2), 10–13. Harrison-Buck, E.,Willis, M., & Walker, C. (2016). Using drones in a threatened archaeological landscape: Rapid survey, salvage, and mapping of the Maya site of Saturday Creek, Belize. The Society for American Archaeology.The SAA Archaeological Record, 16(2), 30–35. Hitchcock, A. (1939). Hitchcock explains what is MacGuffin is. Retrieved from https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=mNkPLuBjZRM Howe, C. (2015). Life above Earth: An introduction special section, openings and retrospectives. Cultural Anthropology, 30(2), 203–209. Jerolmack, C. (2007). Animal practices, ethnicity and community: The Turkish pigeon handlers of Berlin. American Sociological Review, 72(6), 874. Kittler, F. (2009).Toward an ontology of media. Theory, Culture, and Society, 26(2–3), 24. LaFlamme, M. (2018).A sky full of signal:Aviation media in the age of the drone. Media, Culture and Society, 40(5), 689–706. Mark, R., & Billo, E. (2016). Low altitude unmanned aerial photography to assist in rock art studies. The SAA Archaeological Record, 16(2), 14–16. Mattern, S. (2013). Infrastructural tourism. Places Journal. Retrieved from https://placesjournal.org/article/ infrastructural-tourism/

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Drones Meyer, D. E., Lo, E., Afshari, S.,Vaughan, A., Rissolo, D., & Kuester, F. (2016). Utility of low-cost drones to generate 3D models of archaeological sites from multisensor data. The SAA Archaeological Record, 16(2), 22–24. Morton, T. (2013). Hyperobjects: Philosophy and ecology after the end of the world. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Paneque-Gálvez, J.,Vargas-Ramírez, N., Napoletano, B. M., Cummings, A. (2017). Grassroots innovation using drones for indigenous mapping and monitoring. Land, 6(4), 86. Parcak, S. (2009). Satellite Remote Sensing for Archaeology. New York, NY: Routledge. Parcero-Oubiña, C., Mañana-Borrazás, P., Güimil-Fariña, A., Fábrega-Álvarez, P., Pino, M., & Borie, C. (2016). Mapping on a budget:A low-cost UAV approach for the documentation of prehispanic fields in Atacama (N. Chile). The SAA Archaeological Record, 16(2), 17–20. Parks, L. (2013). Mapping orbit:Toward a vertical public space. In C. Berry, J. Harbord, & R. Moore (Eds.), Public space, media space. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Peluso, N. L. (1995).Whose woods are these? Counter-mapping forest territories in Kalimantan, Indonesia. Antipode, 27(94), 383–406. Radjawali, I., Pye, O., & Flinter, M. (2017). Recognition through reconnaissance? Using drones for counter-mapping in Indonesia. Journal of Peasant Studies, 44(4), 817–833. Reynold, J. (2017). Communities combat coca growers: Peruvian state formally recognize forest guardians. If Not Us Then Who? Retrieved from https://ifnotusthenwho.me/films/peruvian-state-formally-reco gnise-forest-guardians/ Sever,T. (1999).The ancient maya landscape from space. In J. D. Nations (Ed.), Thirteen ways of looking at a tropical forest.Washington, DC: Conservation International. University of Texas Archival Resource. (n.d.). Paul Kosok Papers,1933–1959, scope and contents note.Retrieved from https://legacy.lib.utexas.edu/taro/utlac/00442/lac-00442.html Valentine, D. (2017). Gravity fixes: Habituating to the human on Mars and Island Three. Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 7(3), 185–209. van Dooren,T. (2014). Flight ways: Life and loss at the edge of extinction. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

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24 360° VIDEO Mark R. Westmoreland

The rising popularity and accessibility of 360° video makes immersive experiences a new frontier for ethnographic research. While “immersive journalism” and other forms of “immersive witnessing” have gained significant attention through high-profile productions by major news outlets and the United Nations, there has been very little work in what could be called “immersive ethnography.” By having the freedom to look in any direction, 360° video provides viewers an active role in constructing their own visual experience. Often discussed in the context of virtual reality (VR) for its immersive attributes, 360° video is based on direct recordings of actuality rather than on the production of computer-generated environments.Whereas full VR offers users more interactivity by allowing them “to move the ‘camera’ position” within the virtual environment (Reutemann, 2016, p. 162), the video-generated environments of 360° filmmaking may limit users to a more passive experience (Hardee and McMahan, 2017), but nonetheless offers novel ways of interfacing with indexical recordings of lived reality. 360° video thus sits at the intersection of cinematic and VR innovation, presenting a new combination of technological affordances and limitations to consider. The shift from standard video to the enveloping experience of spherical video suggests that we are facing a technological paradigm shift that calls for urgent critical evaluation, particularly when it comes to implementation in visual research methods.

Immersive innovations For over a century the basic framework of filmmaking has remained largely unchanged with regard to its spatial orientation vis-à-vis a subject of interest.The scopic features of the camera meant that it was always pointing at something.The operator would thus position the camera to situate the subject within the frame, while he/she typically remained obscured, if not completely hidden, outside it.This viewer/viewed relationship is reproduced with the projection on screen of carefully framed contents serving as an unambiguous focal point. With the elimination of directionality and the expansion of the screen into a totalizing sphere, 360° video presents one of the most radical changes to the cinematic paradigm.1 Like black-and-white and silent cinema with the introductions of color and sound, this difference in imaging has already prompted the uptake of a new nomenclature,“flat video,” which suggests its anachronistic quality compared to a newer and improved development (Hill, 2016). Having said that, Paolo Favero offers an important 256

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history of immersion in image-making, which counters the normative (and naturalized) adaptation of geometric perspective that distances the viewer from the scene (2018, pp. 43–76). Technological innovation in 360° video has been advancing rapidly on several fronts. First, since a single lens cannot capture a complete 360° perspective, multicamera rigs and omnidirectional cameras have been developed to record in every direction. Subsequently, an algorithmic stitching process spatially synchronizes and stretches multiple flat video images into a unified spherical image. In 2013 Ricoh introduced the first camera with dual symmetrical lenses able to capture a 180° field of view in front and back. Since then, many companies have introduced dual-lens cameras for the consumer market. Meanwhile, in 2015 YouTube and Facebook began to host 360° video on their platforms, making it widely accessible and sharable. In the same year, the New York Times led the way among news providers with 360° content (Hardee and McMahan, 2017, p. 2). While users can navigate these videos on a “flat” computer screen using a mouse or touchpad to move the window around the spherical image-space, the material is generally intended to be viewed with a head-mounted display (HMD) in order to facilitate an immersive experience. On the one hand, the HMD or goggles “perceptually veils” one’s field of view (Reutemann, 2016, p. 163). Unlike conventional cinematic projection and video displays, one can never look beyond or outside the viewing apparatus with goggles mounted to the face. On the other hand, immersion is reliant upon the technical capacities of a VR system to support “the sensorimotor contingencies (SCs)” of eye, head, and body movements (Slater, 2009, p. 3550).The HDM tracks one’s spatial orientation like a fuselage of an aircraft, based on “a set of rotations in this coordinate system, referred to as yaw-pitch-roll” (Almquist and Almquist, 2017, p. 7). Since the medium envelopes the viewer and is coordinated with their movements, it provides “the strong illusion of being in a place in spite of the sure knowledge that you are not there” (Slater, 2009, p. 3551).While high-end versions optimize this experience, a simple set of goggles made from cardboard can quickly convert the ubiquitous smartphone with its integrated gyro sensor into a VR viewing device. To facilitate the development of new viewing sensibilities, the New York Times distributed Google Cardboard goggles to its subscribers, so they could use their smartphones to view 360° news content.

Emotional presence With the external world closed off, immersion ideally enables realistic responses “to the sensory stimuli of the virtual surrounding space, including visceral reactions” (Reutemann, 2016, p. 163). Some suggest that this heightened “sense of presence induced by virtual reality may intensify a variety of emotional and cognitive reactions, including empathy” (Schutte and Stilinović, 2017, p. 711), whereas others argue that the experience of “total immersion,” in which one becomes considerably less aware of actual time and place, correlates specifically with feelings of empathy (Brown and Cairns, 2004). Indeed, advocates claim that this immersive experience facilitates “positive empathic responses” with the people recorded,“showing the power of this media [sic] to engage users and attract their full attention on the stories of other individuals” (Bertrand, Guegan, Robieux, McCall, and Zenasni, 2018, p. 10).This heightened emotional pull has been particularly attractive to aid organizations, who “point to crying spectators and increased donations” (Nash, 2018, p. 129). Chris Milk, who has produced a series of 360° video journalism pieces for the United Nations, has called VR “the ultimate empathy machine” (2015, n.p.). This claim for mediated empathy falls within a long history of images reputedly providing a heightened emotional connection.This celebratory rhetoric flags a need for more critical evaluations. Comparing the responses to “natural disasters” between conventional video coverage and 257

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360° video has shown “that participants in the 360° content condition were significantly more likely to feel a sense of spatial presence,” but only “marginally significantly more likely to have favorable attitudes toward the content than were participants in the traditional video content condition” (Fraustino, Lee, Lee, and Ahn, 2018, p. 338). Studying the effects of “immersive journalism” on international disaster news coverage has produced similar results: providing a greater sense of presence, but not a correlative empathy with “distant suffering” (Van Damme, All, De Marez, and Van Leuven, 2019). While the empathetic affordances of 360° video remain ambiguous, the immersive quality of this modality has discernable repercussions. Engaging the rich field of media witnessing premised on media’s ability to communicate something of an event, Nash examines how “immersive witnessing” goes further to simulate something of an experience. And therein lies the trouble.The intense experience of immersion produces “improper distance” between the viewer and the subject of these films (Chouliaraki cited in Nash, 2018, p. 120).The novelty of the VR experience invites the viewer to explore the space, but by doing so the viewer must turn away from the subject who is providing their testimony of suffering.This split attention undermines one’s ability to truly empathize with another human being. Ironically, the immersive experience that is integral to the empathy machine is “profoundly at odds with the moral demand of the faceto-face encounter” (Nash, 2018, p. 128). Taking the critique further, Sam Gregory of the well-known human rights organization WITNESS suggests that we are highlighting the wrong points about “immersive witnessing.” He concedes that these tools may better enable certain kinds of empathy, but debates whether we should be privileging empathy “over understanding, compassion, solidarity, or action” (Gregory, 2016, n.p.).While 360° video and VR technologies may have greater capacities for immersive experiences, “we need to avoid complacency” (Gregory, 2016, n.p.). In a similar refrain, Rose remarks on the way that “individual feeling becomes the focus for intervention rather than structural inequalities and political exclusions” (as cited in Nash, 2018, p. 129). Furthermore, while 360° video may offer profoundly new modes of visualization, the modalities of witnessing may fall into predictable storytelling conventions. In her overview of the UN VR productions, Nash notes four key qualities that facilitate this. First, these are character-driven stories in which a humanitarian crisis serves as a backdrop. Second, by virtually transporting the viewer on a “guided tour,” these films encourage passive observations through a “tourist gaze” (2018, p. 127). Third, they create “the illusion of social presence” through a simulated encounter of meeting with the other. And, lastly, they attempt to build empathy through a performance of testimony that directly addresses the camera. The promises for immersive and empathetic experiences afforded by this new technology certainly hold important promise for the anthropological project of understanding the “other,” yet it is important to explore in greater depth the assumptions and affordances of this new technology and the way it reconstructs reality.

The grammar of spherical filmmaking Whereas 360° filmmaking strives for minimal user disorientation across a continual viewing plane, two-dimensional filmmaking has developed an elaborate but well-established grammar of selection and re-composition in order to facilitate different kinds of attention. Premised on the affect of “being there,” totally immersed, 360° video enacts a completely different mode of perception than cinema’s conventional strategies of framing, movement, and montage. Framing refers to the art of composition; carefully selecting positions of perception based on proximity, angle, scope, negative space, etc. Movement in cinema animates the dynamics of being kinetically in a space—emplaced and embodied. Montage constitutes the fragmentation of position. 258

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The camera instantly moves into different positions enabled by cutting and reassembling a collection of distinct shots.These conventions help shape meaningful experiences for the viewer. Each of these conventions bear great significance for reconceptualizing the priorities of collaborative, participatory, embodied, and ethical audio-visual (sensory) ethnography when conducted with 360° video, so they deserve further elaboration here. A frame allows an artist or image-maker to control the composition of an image and to distinguish it from its surroundings, but a frame also imposes a rectangular logic on seeing. Influenced by the technical efficiency of reproduction in canvas-based painting and carried over in both print-based photography and reel-based cinematography, our naturalized perspective has been heavily conditioned by the simple geometry of the rectangle. In the choreography of moving images, cinema has developed a series of formal conventions that conceptualize the frame according to notions of compositional balance and directed attention. As Ascher and Pincus put it,“framing can be thought of as a way to control viewers’ attention,” whereas composition “refers to the arrangement of objects within the frame—their balance and tensions” (2013, pp. 324, 325). In cinema, the frame has also been conceptualized as a window on the world. But rather than accentuating the “window” frame, cinema invites audiences to enter the frame. By cultivating audiences to sit in a darkened room, the silver screen captivates our awareness and allows us to become desensitized to the space beyond the edge of the image.The largest of cinema screens, curved to wrap around the viewer, have attempted to further soften our awareness of cinema’s rectangular geometry. CinemaScope, IMAX, and other wide-screen technologies “would allow the frame to virtually disappear, with the result that one felt one’s own body to be coterminous with, and not outside of or removed from, the action represented on screen” (Caton, 1999, p. 73).These now-dated rectangular technologies echo the ambitions of VR “to create a more immersive effect, enveloping peripheral vision” (Caton, 1999, p. 73).Today’s cinemas, with their forward-facing stadium seating and large screens, are ill-equipped to present 360° video productions. Instead, film festivals accommodate viewers in nondescript or darkened rooms with a group of stools distributed in a way that ensures seated viewers won’t bump into each other when rotating. Each seat is allocated a pair of goggles. Once seated in place and with the device mounted to one’s face, the viewer becomes practically unaware of all other participants. Immersion comes at the cost of being socially unaware of the “audience.” In principle, 360° finally liberates us from the frame, however the frame remains present in significant ways.Whether with goggles or on a computer screen, the VR interface only allows us to look at a cropped portion of the whole at any given moment (Almquist and Almquist, 2017), thus reintroducing the rectangular frame as a window on reality. Furthermore, the placement of the 360° camera “underlies the same decision making processes as in traditional framing methods” (Reutemann, 2016, p. 173).These two dilemmas of spatial orientation coalesce in the tension between free movement and fixed positionality, echoing the famous Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson debate on the use of the tripod in filmmaking, with Mead critiquing handheld filming as “jumping around taking pictures” versus Bateson’s critique that a stationary camera “just grinding […] sees nothing” (Bateson, Mead, and Brand, 1977, p. 79,78). Static cameras are preferred in 360° filmmaking due to the risk of inducing “motion sickness” or “virtual reality sickness.”2 The combination of viewer movement and camera movement creates a sensory disjuncture between observed and felt experiences. Stabilizing the camera on a tripod restricts our spherical movement to a fixed position but allows the viewer to control movement around the image sphere by rotating, panning, and tilting one’s head. The privilege of omni-directional viewing may nevertheless evoke the optics of the surveillance camera and a panoptic vision of state authority.3 And the apparent erasure of the filmmaker’s intentions and embodiment echoes the positivistic claims of early photographic technologies and 259

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the gaze of the documentary filmmaker assumedly unnoticed like a “fly on the wall” (Weinberger, 1994).When there is no behind the scenes from which the camera is operated, 360° filmmakers must actively remove themselves from the frame in order to achieve an idealized erasure of mediation awareness. The removal of the camera person from the scene altogether explicitly erases the research and mediating apparatus. By eliminating all aspects of conventional camera movement that highlight the embodied presence of the filmmaker, 360° filmmaking no longer produces a “corporeal image” that has become central to contemporary theories of sensory ethnography. Accordingly, this approach is neither compatible with notions of photographic objectivity nor corporeal practices of filmmaking, but does have the capacity to “resituate the researcher in fieldwork” (Gómez Cruz, 2017, p. xxiii). A stationary 360° camera does not provide the embodiment of handheld cinematography, but an immersive ethnography including the presence of the anthropologist would ultimately expose all research activity “in front of ” the camera. The seamlessness of the spherical image requires viewers to follow the action rather than guide them with continuity editing or dialectical montage.When montage is used in 360° video, editors typically fade between shots to avoid startling the viewer. In the absence of framed shots and cuts to specific points of interest, editors can pin default forward positions to provide orientation, while sound designers utilize spatial audio to direct attention. This has been quite effective in the horror genre, which prompts someone to turn around and be suddenly confronted with a ghost, monster, or zombie. In fact, there is a genre of videos of watching people lose control and collapse to the ground watching these productions.This “misbalance and loss of orientation” is facilitated by the deformed and distorted close-up image as “subjects and objects appearing close to the viewer evoke a strong bodily reaction” (Reutemann, 2016, pp. 172, 167). This “uncanny experience of proximity” also produces an “improper distance” in VR testimonial footage by producing split attention, as stated above. Whereas Andre Bazin saw the opportunity to displace montage—“morseling reality pieceby-piece”—in favor of more theatrically staged choreography with the introduction of widescreen technology (1954, p. 43), Lok Chung’s gadget review—“360° video is dead”—suggests that once the gimmickry had worn off, it left him wanting the conventions of editing (Lok Chung, 2017). Ironically, despite its unique potential to redefine our understanding of vision, the salvation of 360° video technology may not come from novel efforts to expand conventional cinema, but from its ability to complement existing modes of storytelling. For instance, the latest 360° cameras feature the ability to make dynamic crop selections of moving subjects to edit flat videos from selections of spherical images, thus extending the affordance of looking in any direction to its editing capacities. As Lok Chung demonstrates, this provides new opportunities for reinserting the filmmaker in “front” of the camera from a unique angle. By “erasing” the selfie stick in the stitch line it gives the impression that the camera is floating in front of the operator, like a personal drone that follows us wherever we go.The stitch line “was a glitch, now it’s a feature” (Lok Chung, 2017, n.p.). This refiguring of spherical video back into flat images suggests that this advanced technology somehow exceeds our abilities to fully engage an entirely novel vision of the world. This begs the question to what extent can we actually make use of spherical vision? Are there inherent qualities of 360° technology that conventional readings of new imagining technology may miss? Rather than mimicking the grammars of flat images, Max Slater recognizes the potential for VR to create new and fundamentally different forms of experience (2009, p. 3549). Recognizing that different modalities provide different kinds of knowledge, not just different perspectives on the same knowledge, I wondered what aspects of 360° video have been taken 260

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for granted. By hacking this technology to do something different than its designers intended, the rest of this chapter aims to explore ways to think beyond these grammatical conventions and grapple with the affordances inherent in the technology itself.

Hacking 360° video: immersive ethnography goes underwater and underground Opportunities to experiment with 360° video arose from an initiative at Leiden University’s Center for Innovation. Initially, I found their celebratory rhetoric unconvincing and unwittingly reproducing problematic ethical positions of earlier scopic regimes, which made me curious about the underlying assumptions of this new technological way of seeing. For generations of visual anthropologists, audio-visual technologies have enabled very detailed depictions of ethnographic contexts, however, their objectifying qualities have often disguised racist assumptions as truthful science.Aiming to inform the Center about appropriate ethical protocols, particularly as it relates to anthropological knowledge production and data management plans (Pels et al., 2018), led to opportunities to experiment with 360° video firsthand. Rather than taking presence and virtual empathy as given attributes of 360° video, I wanted to know what else it could teach us. Embracing the invitation for innovative thinking “outside the books,” I devised plans to explore the affordances of this new technology. Embracing the idea of immersive ethnography, I cultivated collaborations with two of my colleagues at Leiden University to become immersed in their own field sites. With Annet Pauwelussen we used her ideas of amphibious anthropology of maritime migrants in Indonesia and my idea to remix her own video materials in a spherical montage to create a kaleidoscopic experience of life on the water and underwater.With Sabine Luning we elaborated her ideas about landscapes of extraction doing participatory videos with miners filming themselves above and below ground.These projects were designed to address a series of pedagogical, methodological, and epistemological challenges in ways that would stimulate students’ understanding of ethnographic research. By demonstrating collaboration with colleagues and people in the field, I hoped students would consider how ethnographic knowledge is actively, collaboratively, and experimentally produced and how this facilitates the prospect for discovering unanticipated insights. I wanted to see if the attributes of immersive presence might help students gain richer ethnographic insights by cultivating empathetic perspectives with the people who live in those alternative realities. By framing these projects as speculative and open to productive “failures,” I employed a heuristic, improvisatory approach to the messiness of research with new technologies (Law, 2004). “[R]ather than off-the-peg methods,” digital visual research offers a methodological orientation with a multiplicity of new ways of seeing the world, including “drone cameras, eye-tracking and Google glasses, 360° degrees cameras, smartphones, GoPro cameras and more” (Gómez Cruz, Sumartojo, and Pink, 2017, p. xix). In order to deconstruct the hidden attributes of these technologies of truth, I adopted an experimental approach premised on hacking as a mode of intentionally modifying a piece of technology in a way other than intended in order to produce different and potentially more useful kinds of results. The multiplicity of modes of innovation afforded by hacking these new technologies significantly expands the conceptual and practical possibilities in radically unexpected ways (see Figure 24.1).

Kaleidoscopic vision My colleague Annet Pauwelussen’s (2017) ethnographic research on maritime worlds in Indonesia and the way people live amphibiously in dynamic land-sea environments immediately resonated 261

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Figure 24.1 Amphibious Kaleidoscope. Mark Westmoreland and Annet Pauwelussen (2019).

with my understanding of the immersive affordances of spherical video. She had collected over 30 hours of video footage in the field but had not determined how to best utilize it. Inspired by the cubical arrangement of six GoPro cameras oriented in different directions to produce an amalgamated composite image, I suggested we stitch images from six different amphibious environments together to create an immersive experience.Working with a former student, Silke van Diemen, to edit the material, we conceptualized scenes that combined four groups of seagoing people: scientists, fishers, scavengers, and anthropologists simultaneously doing parallel activities. Based on Annet’s thematic conceptualization of sea to land frontiers, life on a moving vessel in a fluid environment, and the unseen work during tidal shifts, we devised several 360° scenes composed by projecting her existing “flat” footage into an immersive environment. Rather than beginning with a 360° video camera, this project experimented with modes of spherical montage.Whereas the sequences on the boat enclose the four horizon screens with shots of the sky above and sea below, the underwater sequences create an immersive space with the water’s surface above and the seabed below used for sensory orientation. In underwater scenes, the viscous presence of the water throughout the six images might combine in a way that approximates the experience of being present under the water, but the stitch lines imply the juxtaposition of disparate shots. For footage onboard floating vessels, the continuous horizon line in all four of the cardinal directions suggested feeling out at sea, surrounded in all directions.And temporary landings on reefs during tidal changes provide a sense of the daily transformations in an amphibious environment. The (invisible) edit in conventional 360° video is not the cut “in the blink of an eye” between shots in time (Murch, 2001), but the faint stitch lines where flat images have been sutured. By accentuating edges rather than seamlessness, spherical montage radically restructures the conventions of VR space. Rather than the objectifying gaze of colonial anthropology, montage speaks to the critical ambitions at the heart of contemporary global ethnography to disrupt overdetermined social and cultural categories (Suhr and Willerslev, 2013). While working with the material, we discovered two other ways to view the montage. Whereas goggles allow the sensorimotor contingencies of head movement, screen-based media browsers also allow viewers to zoom in and out.When fully zoomed out, the image becomes a circle as if looking at a distant object through a telescope.This distancing of perspective enables us to see the entire 360° sphere as a singular whole.While the perspective is still defined by the 262

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camera’s fixed position, one can rotate the gaze to obtain incredible multifaceted perspectives on these scenes. While a lateral gaze out to the horizon now appears distorted as if through a crystal ball, the most awe-inspiring perspectives come by looking along the zenith/nadir vector. In the industry, these perspectives are known as the “hamster wheel” and “tiny planet” effects. Whereas looking straight down at the ground produces the tiny planet effect with an inner earthen sphere encircled by an outer ring of sky, the hamster wheel refers to people’s gravitydefying movement around the outer earthen ring with a hollow sky in the center.The ability to see a complete 360˚ perspective in two radically different ways suggests a kind of Möbius strip effect being both inside and outside. With the six panels comprised of Annet’s amphibious footage, the “tiny planet” situates a well of water in the center with the sky around the perimeter.The movement of clouds and waves in different concentric circles creates a swirling effect, while four perspectives of the horizon play simultaneously in an in-between ring. Rather than the mastery of the telescope, the busyness of all these moving patterns—the result of a multimodal assemblage of technologies—has a kaleidoscopic effect of juxtaposing shots, movement, color, and texture in unexpected patterns. The fragmented mosaic patterns evoke notions of montage that have otherwise been evacuated from VR vision and serves as a model for dynamic perception and imaginative thinking. Kaleidoscopic vision offers a different conceptualization of immersive ethnography that resonates with an amphibious theory of life in the spaces between land and water. Kaleidoscopic vision thus facilitates a conceptual attunement that can be carried back to the same footage when viewed through goggles in ways that ideally make the viewer more aware of the parallel patterns of activity in the discrete panels. Students reported feeling initially confused, if not seasick, but many found this demanded closer attention that could be related to specific ethnographic insights and anthropological theorization (see Figure 24.2).

Broken Ground When my colleague Sabine Luning expressed interest in visual methods for her ongoing research on small-scale gold mining in West Africa, I recommended 360° video as a way to visualize an

Figure 24.2 Broken Ground—Equirectangular. Mark Westmoreland and Zakari Imorana (2018).

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underworld that she chose not to descend into herself. For researchers bound to the surface, we could not imagine what working deep underground looks, sounds, and feels like.To access this hidden landscape of extraction in a collaborative way, we equipped miners with different fixed, handheld, and body-mounted camera-rigs to co-create an immersive ethnography called Broken Ground (Westmoreland and Luning, 2018). During our first visit to Kejetia, a makeshift gold-mining town in northern Ghana, Zakari Imorana volunteered to wear a 360° video camera on his shoulder as he toured two mining shafts. He recorded on the new GoPro Fusion, which uses two independent lenses to record 5.2K video onto two separate SD cards and amasses 1GB of audio-visual data for every minute recorded. Eager to see the footage, that night I tried to stitch the two hemispherical portions together in order to produce a complete composite image, but processing the files proved too intensive for my aging laptop. In order to play these heavy data files in the field we had to screen each hemisphere on adjacent laptops. Simultaneously reviewing forward and rear-facing footage, Zakari’s descent becomes mesmerizing as the earth seems to swallow him. Engulfed in darkness, the surface light bounces around the left screen, growing ever smaller above. On the right, Zakari’s narrow beam of light moves erratically across the cave’s surface showing indecipherable rocky surfaces and wooden supports. Zakari rendered these sights more comprehensible with a running narration: I’m moving straight down. I hope you can see. … Can you see? This a rock, not a stone. It’s a waste. I’ll get to the stone and let you see. … I’m still moving down. … I’m now there. … I hope you can see this.This is the main face. Here’s the stone. The triangulation between the separated visual perspectives and Zakari’s guiding commentary created an unexpected feeling of temporal co-presence and spatial distanciation. After reviewing the footage together with the miners, we asked Zakari to take the camera down again with a better light and with the camera mounted to a tripod, rather than to his shoulder. Entering a busy hub of activity, the additional light illuminates a sizable chamber where a “gang” of “soldiers” work to haul up a week’s worth of stone extraction (~50 sacks). Bags are filled and passed into the darkness where a trail of headlamps and voices reveal the social topography of vertical working environments. Immersed in this dark and disorienting place, the visually impaired viewer is drawn to the sonic registers of hammering, grunting, laughter, and joking, which reveal these mining pits as ethnographically cosmopolitan spaces with different languages and histories intermingling. Interested in also understanding the social dynamics on the ground, we again equipped Zakari with a body-mounted 360˚camera and asked him to go with others on a tour of the town interviewing residents and shopkeepers. In order to avoid suspicion, they preferred to go without a foreign anthropologist.As innocuous as a small action camera mounted might seem at least one interlocutor scrutinized its presence,“jokingly” demanding payment up front, but then continuing to address the makeshift researchers and camera. Mounted to Zakari’s shoulder as he walks through town, the camera embodies the rhythmic movement of his stride.The combination of walking alongside Zakari and the freedom to move one’s head in any direction creates a strange feeling of presence.When Zakari and his associates engage townspeople in conversation, the viewer’s ability to look away while examining the surroundings reproduces the problem of “improper distance” of distracted attention.And while the proximity of Zakari’s head affords an extreme close-up of his face—scarred by a stitch line—more interesting is the strongly subjective vantage point of his digital practices as he pulls out his smartphone to check a message. Rather than a simplistic feeling of empathy, these materials offered a variety of perspectives that accentuated both sensual proximity and critical distance. 264

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Ultimately, we combined these materials with a variety of other modalities to create a sixpart virtual field school that provides students with an incremental introduction to Kejetia and the life of a miner. Students overwhelmingly appreciated the multimodal approach to the learning module and its multiplicity of access points, while also challenging them to continually attune their perceptual acuity.

Conclusion The experimental aspect of these two projects highlights some of the natural affordances of the technology that have remained unexplored.Their importance comes from their ability to highlight unexpected insights about both content and form.Whereas the amphibious experiment attempted to re-assemble fragments of sound and image into a single kaleidoscopic perspective, the Broken Ground project foregrounds the distortions and disjunctures in the assembly process that typically go unmentioned in conventional uses of 360° video.The deferral of stitching the two hemispheres together due to high technical requirements materializes spherical image-making in halting steps, each producing another perspective. Separately, the two hemispheres reveal the extreme fisheye distortion at the edge of the lens.After combining these two stereoscopic images, a standard media browser geometrically renders the image as equirectangular, like a disproportioned globe when flattened into a two-dimensional map. Ultimately, the seemingly borderless plane of spherical video is “nothing more than 2D pixels wrapped around the viewer” (Hardee and McMahan, 2017, p. 8). These challenges to an idealized characterization of virtual immersion bear important insights about the limits of human vision. In fact, as there is no way to see the entire image without distortion, the virtual vérité of 360° video does not offer a particularly human perspective.Whereas goggles use two parallax frames cropped to mimic a stereoscopic perspective of two forwardfacing eyes, the laterally mounted lenses of the 360° video camera resemble the bilateral vision common in other species.The distinction between these two perspectives echoes the differences in predator and prey vision.Whereas animals that hunt rely upon the affordances of stereopsis vision to assess depth of field and distance to a particular target, the wider field of view of lateral vision affords animals of prey alertness to predators on the horizon. Rather than eliding these differences and privileging binocular vision, 360° video may afford us opportunities to radically open our perspectives—epistemologically and ontologically—to other world views.

Notes 1 The lack of directionality can present problems. The front lens provides a central reference point in the editing interface, which is important for directing a viewer’s attention. Careless placement may also introduce stitch lines through key content. 2 http://www.vrglossary.org/glossary/motion-sickness/ 3 See the recent adaptation of Fahrenheit 451 (Bahrani, 2018).

References Almquist, M., & Almquist,V. (2017). Analysis of 360° video viewing behaviours (Masters of Computer Science). Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden. Ascher, S., & Pincus, E. (2013). The filmmaker’s handbook: A comprehensive guide for the digital age. London: Plume. Bahrani, R. (2018). Fahrenheit 451. New York: HBO Films. Bateson, G., Mead, M., & Brand, S. (1977). Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson on the use of the camera in anthropology. Studies in the Anthropology of Visual Communication, 4(2), 78–80. Bazin,A. (1954). Fin du montage. Cahiers Du Cinéma, 31, 43.

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Mark R. Westmoreland Bertrand, P., Guegan, J., Robieux, L., McCall, C. A., & Zenasni, F. (2018). Learning empathy through virtual reality: Multiple strategies for training empathy-related abilities using body ownership illusions in embodied virtual reality. Frontiers in Robotics and AI, 5(26), 1-18. Brown, E., & Cairns, P. (2004). A grounded investigation of game immersion. In Extended abstracts of the 2004 conference on human factors and computing systems - CHI’04 (p. 1297-1300), eds. B. Bomsdorf, G. Engelbeck, and C. Kremer Vieria da Cunha.Vienna,Austria:ACM Press. Caton, S. C. (1999). Lawrence of Arabia:A film’s anthropology. Berkeley/Los Angeles, CA/London: University of California Press. Chung, L. (2017). Is 360 video DEAD? Let’s lok and see. New York: B&H Photo Video. Retrieved from https ://www.youtube.com/watch?v=duhlNe6ZnSo Favero, P. S. H. (2018). The present image: Visible stories in a digital habitat. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. Fraustino, J. D., Lee, J.Y., Lee, S.Y., & Ahn, H. (2018). Effects of 360° video on attitudes toward disaster communication: Mediating and moderating roles of spatial presence and prior disaster media involvement. Public Relations Review, 44(3), 331–341. Gómez Cruz, E. (2017). Immersive reflexivity: Using 360° cameras in ethnographic fieldwork. In E. Gómez Cruz, S. Sumartojo, & S. Pink (Eds.), Refiguring techniques in digital visual research (pp. 25–38). Cham: Springer International Publishing. Gómez Cruz, E., Sumartojo, S., & Pink, S. (Eds.). (2017). Refiguring techniques in digital visual research. Cham: Springer International Publishing. Gregory, S. (2016, August 2). Immersive witnessing: From empathy and outrage to action. Retrieved January 27, 2019, from https://blog.witness.org/2016/08/immersive-witnessing-from-empathy-and -outrage-to-action/ Hardee, G. M., & McMahan, R. P. (2017). FIJI: A framework for the immersion-journalism intersection. Frontiers in ICT, 4(21), 1-18. Hill, S. (2016, May 19). 360 video vs. flat video:A case study. Retrieved March 11, 2019, from https://virtual realitypop.com/360-video-vs-flat-video-a-case-study-9b49050b6277 Law, J. (2004). After method: Mess in social science research. Psychology Press. Milk, C. (2015). How virtual reality can create the ultimate empathy machine. Retrieved from https:// www.ted.com/talks/chris_milk_how:virtual_reality_can_create_the_ultimate_empathy_machine?lan guage=en Murch, W. (2001). In the blink of an eye:A perspective on film editing (2nd ed.). Los Angeles, CA: Silman-James Press. Nash, K. (2018).Virtual reality witness: Exploring the ethics of mediated presence. Studies in Documentary Film, 12(2), 119–131. Pauwelussen, A. P. (2017). Amphibious anthropology: Engaging with martime worlds in Indonesia (Ph.D. thesis). Wageningen University, Netherlands. Pels, P., Boog, I., Florusbosch, J. H., Kripe, Z., Minter,T., Postma, M., … Richards-Rissetto, H. (2018). Data management in anthropology:The next phase in ethics governance? Social Anthropology, 26(3), 391–413. Reutemann, J. (2016).Too close to be true:Virtual reality images bring the visible speaker into your face (literally). In L. C. Grabbe, P. Rupert-Kruse, & N. M. Schmitz (Eds.), Image embodiment: New perspectives of the sensory turn (pp. 161–181). Münster, Germany: Buchner. Schutte, N. S., & Stilinović, E. J. (2017). Facilitating empathy through virtual reality. Motivation and Emotion, 41(6), 708–712. Slater, M. (2009). Place illusion and plausibility can lead to realistic behaviour in immersive virtual environments. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 364(1535), 3549–3557. Suhr, C., & Willerslev, R. (2013). Transcultural montage. New York, NY: Berghahn Books. Van Damme, K., All, A., De Marez, L., & Van Leuven, S. (2019). 360° video journalism: Experimental study on the effect of immersion on news experience and distant suffering. Journalism Studies, 20:14, 2053-2076. Weinberger, E. (1994).The camera people. In Visualizing theory: Selected essays from V.A.R., 1990-1994, ed. L.Taylor, (pp. 3–26). New York, NY: Routledge. Westmoreland, M., & Luning, S. (2018, March 22). Footage of failure: Multimodality in practice. Retrieved from https://www.leidenanthropologyblog.nl/articles/footage-of-failure-multimodality-in-practice

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25 SCREENS AS FILM LOCATIONS Steffen Köhn

In the light of Internet-based forms of communication and the rise of social media, the screens of our computers, mobile phones, and tablets, have become primary sites for worldly interaction. Their graphical user interfaces now mediate our engagement with the wider world, frame our public self-expressions, and constitute the places where we live out a good deal of our social relations. For Alexander Galloway (2012, p. 32f.), interfaces are autonomous zones of aesthetic activity with their own ability to generate new results and consequences that can tell us something about our contemporary lives. Contrary to popular perception, he argues that they are not transparent “doors” or “windows” that merely mediate seamlessly between our bodies and the external world of devices but rather produce effects, processes, and translations. In this article, I therefore want to propose that the desktop screen is not only an important site for ethnographic research, but also a possible filming location for an emerging mode of documentary filmmaking that fully embraces the poetics of digital culture. As many contributions to this present book outline, contemporary ethnographic film and video has begun to open itself up for more experimental, multivocal, and multimodal ways of making that depart from the old canon of an anthropologist in the field with a camera. Considering such new approaches, I will discuss a range of films that are created not with conventional film cameras but with screen recording and compositing software and that interweave audio-visual material such as screencasts, Internet-found footage, feed from webcams or devices’ in-built-cameras, or imagery from the real-time computer graphics engines of online video games. Hence, these films constitute an innovative cinematic form for exploring contemporary social reality by working with everything computers put in front of our eyes and ears and by mobilizing all the means they offer us to manipulate reality.These desktop documentaries examine the affordances and constraints of digital mediation by reflecting their subject matter in their aesthetic form. They employ the computer screen as both a camera lens and a canvas and use interfaces to tell their stories in a cinematic way. The relationship between humans and digital media in contemporary social, cultural, political, and economic processes has become a primary concern for scholars across the humanities and social sciences. Publications in the rapidly expanding field of digital anthropology (Frömming et al., 2017; Hine, 2015; Hjorth et. al., 2017; Horst and Miller, 2012; Miller et al., 2016; Pink et. al., 2015) have examined the Internet-related transformations that have brought about a whole range of phenomena such as locative and social media, online communities, 267

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or digital infrastructures that foster new expressions of identity, as well as new configurations of sociality, exchange, and intimacy.Yet the overwhelming majority of digital anthropologists hardly ever uses the digital media they research on to communicate their findings. Instead, they still solely rely on mediation through text by writing articles and monographs. In a similar vein, contemporary ethnographic filmmakers now use the latest digital technologies like GoPros or mirrorless cameras, but almost never reflect their research participants’ media worlds and practices in their films. Hence, I argue that it is about time to merge the practices of digital anthropology and ethnographic filmmaking. The following examples, with which I want to outline a future “ethnographic desktop documentary” practice, draw from the work of media artists with an interest in the social dimensions of digital media use, as well as from works by students and alumni of Freie Universität Berlin’s Master’s program in Visual and Media Anthropology, where we encourage students in the Digital Anthropology course to conduct audio-visual fieldwork in online communities and explore the aesthetics of the digital process in the form of short virtual in-world-films. In what follows, I will identify three distinct modes of the desktop documentary: (1) films that take place on researchers’ desktop screens and chronicle their online research (2) “ethnographic machinimas” that examine virtual worlds as sites of social immersion, and (3) works that evoke research participants’ actual digital media practices and user experiences. I will discuss the exciting opportunities that each of these approaches offers for practicing visual anthropology in the digital age.

Representing online research trajectories Desktop filmmaking can be a means to convey online research processes and to analytically engage with Internet material in an audio-visual format. This mode of desktop documentary has been heavily influenced by the genre of the video essay, which has become an influential form of online film criticism. One pioneer of the analytical video essay is Kevin B. Lee, whose work has revolutionized film and media studies teaching and learning. Over the last ten years, Lee has produced over 350 video essays that investigate montage, camera work, film motifs, and political subtexts in both mainstream Hollywood and lesser-known art house films. Lee has actually coined the term “desktop documentary” (for which I, however, propose a broader understanding in this article than his) to describe his film Transformers: The Premake (2014), his most complex work to date. Departing from the hermeneutic analysis of film language in his video essays, in Transformers Lee examines the broader social implications around the production and marketing of a global blockbuster. He tracks the dissemination of videos that fans of the Transformers saga had filmed during the shooting of Michael Bay’s Transformers—the Age of Extinction in Chicago, Detroit, Utah,Texas, Hong Kong, and mainland China.This amateur behind-the-scenes footage circulated online before the film was even released, thus allowing Lee’s film to be a “premake,” as he could release his work before the new Transformers episode hit cinemas. Lee shows how these viral videos from the Transformers set are actually part of a complex marketing strategy that heavily relies on “fan labor,” the creative activities engaged in by devotees of the movie franchise. Taking place entirely on his desktop screen, the film unfolds Lee’s research as he opens websites, compares set footage posted on YouTube, types into text documents, or communicates with fan video makers via email or messaging. A virtual camera constantly zooms in on his browser’s input line, search results, news documents, or found commentary from all corners of the globe. This creates the illusion of watching Lee work on a computer in real time as his mouse pointer enters and exits websites, stacks or resizes videos, opens texts or maps, and presents his findings. His film and research could fully take place on his computer screen as the Internet provided 268

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all the necessary material for a multifaceted analysis of the economic and cultural implications of Transformers’ game-changing crowd-sourced PR campaign, its creative exploitation of local tax incentives, and its geopolitical aspirations of tapping into the lucrative but heavily protected Chinese box office market. By exploring the role of fans and everyday people as viral publicists for the movie, he unravels how consumers become the (unpaid) producers of attention and symbolic capital, thus providing a critical investigation of the political economy of viral imagery. Using a similar style but engaging in a more intimate ethnographic relationship with his interlocutors, Leandro Goddinho documents his online research on HIV-positive digital activists in his film Positive YouTubers (2017). Goddinho’s research participants are four Brazilian HIVpositive men who use their social media channels as platforms to talk openly and positively about their status as well as to provide information, fight prejudices, and give support to others in a similar situation. Publicly sharing intimate moments of their lives on a daily basis, they have created a sense of community amongst themselves and online where they encourage their audiences to interact, learn, and exchange their knowledge, worries, and doubts about a subject matter that still remains taboo. His film weaves together Skype interviews with his research participants, extracts from their YouTube videos, and snippets from their social media presences to create a multivocal portrait of a contemporary form of Internet activism. He conveys his research by creating a complex on-screen spatial arrangement of video chat windows, browser tabs, or the scroll-through dynamics of Facebook’s or Instagram’s news feeds. This results in a kind of “spatial montage,” a term Lev Manovich introduced in The Language of New Media (2001), his original poetics of digital culture. Manovich’s notion of spatial montage alludes to the multiple windows of graphical user interfaces and suggests the advent of a computer-based aesthetics that moves away from the temporal montage of (conventional) cinema and its “logic of replacement” toward a “logic of addition and co-existence” (2001, p. 325). Such an aesthetics of spatial montage lies at the heart of the desktop documentary approach that deploys the creative re-arrangement, contrasting, and simultaneity of digital images as an analytical strategy. Positive YouTubers further plays with the colorful visual language of online communication by frequently incorporating emojis, app symbols, and iconic depictions of devices that serve as frames for some of the featured video snippets (see Figure 25.1). Hence, the film creatively explores new forms of interaction, information, and activism facilitated by the Internet. Both Lee’s and Goddinho’s films provide an in-depth analysis of online audio-visual discourse as well as a (reconstructed, of course) documentation of their respective research trajectories. As they compose their works solely from online visual materials, producing images from visuals that have been produced by others, both filmmakers also propose a new understanding of ethnographic filmmaking in the digital age. Instead of adding to the vast amount of digital imagery that is already out there, they rather invent aesthetic strategies to scrutinize the images their research participants post on a daily basis. They understand these images as social documents that are articulative of broader social dynamics. Like curators, they select, arrange, and condense these images in order to put forth an analysis that potentially creates a greater understanding of contemporary image culture and helps us make sense of the increasing role audiovisual communication plays in our everyday lives.

Documenting virtual worlds In this section I want to discuss the potential of the desktop documentary approach for the exploration of online sociality in virtual worlds, a nascent field of ethnographic research that has gained much currency in recent years (e.g., Boellstorff, 2008; Chen, 2012; Frömming, 2013; 269

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Figure 25.1 Spatial montage in Positive YouTubers. Steffen Köhn.

Nardi, 2010; Pearce, 2009;Taylor, 2006). Anthropologists have become fascinated by the popularization of virtual worlds like Second Life or Altspace VR and massively multiplayer online games (MMORPGs) such as World of Warcraft or The Elder Scrolls and the complex cultural practices of play, performance, creativity, and ritual they bring about. Boellstorff and colleagues (Boellstorff et al., 2012, p. 6) define virtual worlds as three-dimensional, visually and aurally realistic worlds generated by computers, that are shared between multiple participants and are persistent (i.e., they continue to exist even if no one is logged on).They further allow users to embody themselves, usually in the form of avatars, and they have a sense of placeness and worldness, offering an object-rich environment with which one can interact. By virtue of their global scope, they draw players from all over the world and hence offer manifold opportunities for intercultural encounters and exposure to distinct cultural perspectives and expressions. Boellstorff and colleagues (2012) therefore propose ethnography as a powerful approach for studying the cultures of virtual worlds in the form of in-game online participant observation. For quite some time now, the real-time three-dimensional computer graphics rendering engines that bring virtual worlds to audio-visual life have been used for making animated films. Such so-called “machinimas” (a portmanteau of “machine” and “cinema”) constitute a film genre that is created, produced, and exhibited entirely with digital technology and situated between gaming, fan, and film cultures (Ng, 2013).While there have been a few attempts to open the genre to documentary forms (e.g., Danilovic, 2013), this desktop-based style of film production has remained virtually unexplored in ethnographic filmmaking. One notable exception however is Mohawk artist Skawennati’s Second Life–based machinima series TimeTravellerTM (2008–2013). This nine-part series follows a young Mohawk man, Hunter, who lives in the year 2121 and embarks on a technologically enabled vision quest that takes him back in time to historical conflicts that have involved First Nations people. The work reflects on the long history of misrepresenting Indigenous people through media by challenging historical authority and the alleged temporal boundaries of Indigenous existence, establishing them instead as full 270

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participants of the future by integrating their traditional cultural imagery with high-tech equipment and processes (Lempert, 2018). Besides providing an easy way to manipulate real-time virtual three-dimensional environment to cinematically evoke futurities, machinimas also inherit a more documentary potential as they may serve as outlets for the representation of ethnographic fieldwork data that have been collected in virtual worlds. Their production might further constitute a method of conducting fieldwork itself by generating field records in movement and facilitating deeper interaction with virtual world residents. Jón Bjarki Magnússon’s ethnographic machinima Even Asteroids Are Not Alone (2017) for example is the outcome of a research study on how online sociality, trust, and community building evolves between players in EVE Online, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) in which hundreds of thousands of players mine, trade, and fight their way through a space-based science-fiction setting. Since its release in 2003, EVE Online has garnered somewhat of a cult following, slowly but steadily growing its subscription base over many years. It is known for its radical and unusual gameplay that celebrates player agency as it allows players to engage in unscripted economic competition, scamming, theft, and treachery and all kinds of political schemes (Brooks, 2017). It has repeatedly made headlines as the site of gigantic player versus player battles that involved thousands of participants and were spread over many hours. Magnússon’s audio-visual research is concerned with the complex forms of player organization in EVE Online and with the question of how relationships build in a game whose design propagates pervasive betrayal. Magnússon has conducted in-world interviews with 14 players from different nationalities via the voice-over-IP communication system TeamSpeak (which is commonly used for online gaming). For the film’s audio track, these one-on-one or focus group interviews are interwoven with TeamSpeak recordings from actual missions players performed together to evoke the game’s distinct social dynamics. In the interviews, players describe how the game, which puts so much emphasis on deception, paradoxically also facilitates the forging of strong communities, which over time bridge the space between people, countries, and continents. For many of his research participants, the bonds that they formed online have had real-life implications reaching far beyond the game itself, transforming into real-life friendships as in-game conversations during long and tedious missions slowly move out-of-character and toward more personal, private topics. To represent the in-game audio-visual experience of his interlocutors, Magnússon used imagery extracted from his own gameplay as well as the game’s distinct musical score. Whilst traveling through the solar systems where members of his corporation had set up a base, he gathered screencasts of the planets, space stations, asteroid belts, and the general landscapes that constitute the worlds of many of his interviewees. He mainly recorded his own character when flying different space ships to portray other players in the game, but he also recorded other corporation members’ space ships at work, for example mining asteroid belts. As EVE Online not only constitutes a virtual world but in fact a virtual universe, he flew to many different solar systems in order to add different-looking spaces and stations—for example in the hectic business hub of Jita, the most populated system in EVE where he collected images of the heavy space traffic. Much of the image editing is only loosely linked to the interview content and rather aims to capture the spaced-out feeling created by the sheer vastness of the virtual EVE universe that one can explore for an eternity and that makes the game so immersive. However, there repeatedly are distinct moments when the visuals communicate directly with the stories told. When one player for example talks about his favorite activity of exploring the infinity and detailedness of the universe, we are situated in a wormhole that leads us to other galaxies. Another example for such associative editing is when another gamer is describing how he once flew to the 271

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United States to visit an in-game friend there. Here, Magnússon shows us the process of docking at a station, an activity players do before leaving the game and going back into the physical world. As it documents the highly communicative dynamics between players that frequently shift between in-character and out-of-character as well as between in-game and offline interaction, Even Asteroids Are Not Alone clearly demonstrates how the inhabitants of EVE Online experience a continuity between their online and offline identities. It therefore perfectly illustrates Boellstorff ’s (2016) theorization of digital reality. Drawing on ontological-turn scholarship, Boellstorff shows how much contemporary anthropological thinking about technology is haunted by a false opposition between the digital (or virtual or online) and the real. He unfolds the myriad ways in which, for example, virtual worlds as persistent contexts of social immersion are real places that must be understood on their own terms and that constantly interact with the physical reality. He claims that it is even actually quite common for the physical to simulate the digital, for example in offline social interactions that draw on norms, assumptions, or even networks from the online, such as in meetings of people in the physical world whose primary interactions are digital. Furthermore, skills learned or relationships built in a virtual world obviously are as real as, for example, the pizza one EVE Online player recalls getting ordered from his local delivery service by another player (who resided at a completely different location) as a sign of friendship. Even Asteroids Are Not Alone beautifully conveys these complex forms reality takes on online and indicates how it is realized or enacted, thus underscoring the reality of online cultures and their offline implications. In some cases, these even become matters of life and death, for example when one interlocutor recounts how he called an ambulance for a player who announced ingame that he swallowed pills in an attempt to commit suicide (see Figure 25.2). Ethnographic desktop filmmaking that employs the game engine of the virtual world in which it is recorded to document its reality further raises interesting epistemological and ontological questions. As Danilovic (2013, p. 170) notes, the virtual camera used for shoot-

Figure 25.2 The Jita Memorial commemorates a historical event in EVE Online that took place in the solar system of Jita in 2011 and has sometimes been described as the biggest protest ever taking place in an online community. Steffen Köhn.

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ing machinima is actually part of the act of seeing in a virtual world as we experience the (computer-coded) physical and aesthetic laws of that world through it, such as how avatars are moving and how they behave, what the surroundings looks like, or how the light illuminates in-world objects or characters.The virtual camera hence achieves a sort of Bazinian cinematic realism, a transparent relationship with the in-world reality as perceiving and recording this reality, the profilmic and the filmic, fall into one. One of the unwritten rules of the machinima genre, to which Even Asteroids Are Not Alone and TimeTravellerTM also adhere, is that the actual user interface through which one controls one’s avatar is never shown. Instead of conveying the individual player perspective, machinimas rather seek to achieve an objective, observational representation of the virtual world. Freed from all physical constraints, the virtual camera is capturing its visual affluence with an unprecedented literacy and traverses it as an aesthetic playground. Hence, ethnographic machinima’s ontology is its documentation and reproduction of the richness, plurality, and diversity of virtual worlds as digital realities, as sites of being and becoming.

Evoking user experience Whereas the first two modes of desktop documentary I discussed are situated on the filmmaker’s desktop screen (either documenting the filmmaker’s research process or using her/his avatar as the embodied entry point to the virtual world represented), I will now introduce films that are actually set on their research participants’ mobile or computer screens and thus not only attempt to document individual use patterns but also directly recreate particular user experiences. How users appropriate digital communication media, for example to maintain or negotiate relationships over borders and vast geographical distances, has become a major research theme. First ethnographic studies on migrant media use (e.g., Hyndman-Rizk, 2014; Longhurst, 2013; Madianou and Miller, 2012; Miller and Sinanan, 2014) point to the creative ways in which many migrants have adapted webcam, smartphones, and social media platforms to collapse distance and build a synchronic social space with their faraway families. For my desktop documentary Intimate Distance (2015), I explored the webcam communication practices of three transnational families to show how the medium affords feelings of proximity and synchronicity, of temporal co-presence over spatial distance.The project was inspired by Madaianou and Miller’s (2012) ethnography on Filipina migrant mothers working in Great Britain who parent their left-behind children from a distance with the use of digital media. Before the advent of new information communication technologies (ICTs), migrant families could only communicate through asynchronous media like occasional letters or through very infrequent and expensive phone calls.Yet with the new digital communication technologies being available at almost no cost, migrant mothers can now continue to be present in their kids’ lives. Madaianou and Miller argue that particularly Skype’s video call function has revolutionized communications between mothers and children, as mothers can now actually see how their children grow up in front of the webcam. Reading their work, I became interested in the experiential dimension of this form of mediation. I was, however, unconvinced by the methodology of the study. Madianou and Miller (and also many other authors of such digital ethnographies) gathered their data merely through interviews with mothers and children and thus explored the experiences of their research participants only through retrospective assessment.Yet such a recollective production of meaningmaking might not be able to account for the pre-reflective, affective, and immediate experiences involved in the instantaneous communication via webcam. As Miller and Madianou did not engage in any form of participant observation, they had nothing to say about the real-time unfolding of immediate experience.To come close to these immediate experiences involved in 273

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the use of digital media, I initiated a documentary film project for which I asked transnational families to actually record their webcam conversations with the help of simple software.These many hours of screencasts then provided not only a much more immediate set of data unbiased by retrospective assessment, but also the raw material for a film that directly conveys my protagonists’ many fascinating webcam rituals. Working with such private screen recordings obviously raises important issues about informed consent, as this material offered me a very intimate view into my research participants’ private lives.Therefore, I agreed with all participants that they would only hand me over recordings they didn’t feel were too sensitive and that they had the possibility to cut out parts of conversations they didn’t want me to see.With regard to the film I edited from this material, every participant had a say in how I presented their relationship and also had the right to veto any particular scenes. My protagonists therefore generated the footage for the film themselves, making this a highly collaborative project. The most fascinating aspect of my research participants’ webcam use is that it transgresses mere visual telephony. All participants used the technology predominantly to visually join the domestic spaces in front of the webcam in order to achieve a feeling of co-habitation.Axel and Serpil, a German-Turkish couple, for example left the webcam on for hours, often without interacting at all. Serpil would for example read in front of the camera or go out of its range to have a shower and then come back, while Axel would place his Laptop so that the webcam takes in his whole kitchen while he cooks or washes the dishes. Miller and Sinanan have called this phenomenon “always-on” webcamming and argue that it aims to create a kind of intimacy analogous to the taken-for-granted presence of a partner with whom one shares one domestic space (2014, p. 54f.). Another interesting aspect Intimate Distance conveys is the dimension of temporal experience.While Skype and other social media promise to connect us instantaneously and seamlessly across the globe, in many user contexts the “friction of distance” (Knox and Marston 2012, p. 28) is still very much in place. For my research participant Mercedita for example, the experience of Skyping with her teenage son in the Philippines is marked by distortions, low resolution, bad video compression, and even the occasional breakdown of connection. In this respect, Mercedita’s temporal experience is not one of “real time,” but rather one of waiting, interference, and dropouts due to the slow Internet connection. I deliberately included such moments of malfunction and digital artifacts in the film to convey how the “digital divide” is still very much in place and that, without the appropriate infrastructure, the actual experience of digital media use can still be one of asynchronicity and disconnect. A work that even goes a full step further in immersing the viewer into an actual user experience is the short video Your Phone Is Now a Refugee Phone (2016), produced by Tom Hannen at BBC Media Action, the BBC’s international development charity.The film is based on fieldwork conducted by BBC Media Action’s research team (2016) and it is focused on the communication needs of refugees in Europe.This inquiry aimed at helping humanitarian agencies become aware of the communication issues of refugees in transit. In total, the research team conducted 79 individual and 16 focus group interviews with refugees residing in camps in Germany and Greece. Hannen’s piece is based on stories from this research and tries to convey the importance of communication and information during their perilous journeys. It is produced in vertical format and therefore supposed to be watched on an actual smartphone with headphones. The whole video implicates the viewer in a radically subjective perspective as it fully takes place on the iPhone user interface.The effect this creates is uncanny.The video gives viewers the impression that it is taking over their device as text messages and WhatsApp notifications keep arriving on the screen that feel as if they were coming from their own contacts 274

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(e.g., from “Dad”).The story unfolds as the unnamed refugee, whose phone has co-opted ours for the course of the video, is opening different iOS apps, sending GPS coordinates to family, filming the surroundings with the phone’s camera on an overcrowded rubber boat on the Mediterranean Sea, or flipping through photos taken during the course of the journey. The story conveys much of the perils, confusion, and uncertainties of the passage. In one instant, while the phone is rapidly running out of battery, we receive messages from a trafficker warning us that the border is closed and that we have to turn back. Hence, while it is obviously constructed, not conveying a particular interlocutor’s account but rather telling a more universal story, the video’s direct form of address brings home its empathic message. Hannen’s virtuoso use of screencasts and documentary footage, which he composited with Photoshopped iOS templates in Adobe After Effects, creates an almost visceral immersion in the narrative that holds much potential for future ethnographic media projects seeking to convey the media realities of their research participants.

Conclusion In Networked Anthropology:A Primer for Ethnographers (2015), Samuel Collins and Matt Durington describe the new, networked reality in which contemporary ethnographic fieldwork inevitably takes place. They explore how the now ubiquitous social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter affect anthropological research and teaching and how the possibility for constant connection changes our relationships to our research participants in the field, as well as our possibilities of disseminating our findings and sharing our experiences in (almost) real time. Doing networked anthropology obviously generates ethnographic data in multiple media, be it in the form of video, photo, text, or audio.Therefore, it demands us to produce multimodal work that directly and creatively engages with the media, aesthetics, and platforms that shape the worlds of our research participants as they constantly develop new content and connections. Ethnographic desktop documentaries can therefore offer a fresh cinematic language for describing the convergence of these different modes and media. They constitute a new representational form for negotiating the array of audio-visual media that now form the staples of the digital age. As this form of audio-visual ethnography is at home in the Internet and so deeply embedded in its aesthetics, it may further help us reach much wider audiences and may ultimately move through social media itself.Think for example of Michael Wesch’s short video essay The Machine Is Us/ing Us (2007) that explained the cultural significance of digital text and the nature of Web 2.0.Wesch’s video, which was originally created for his Digital Ethnography class but by now has been watched over 12 million times, in many ways is a desktop documentary avant la lettre, using screen captures to make its point about the impacts of digital technology on human interaction. Exploring online phenomena, the video became an online phenomenon itself. It therefore provides an exciting blueprint for how ethnographic knowledge may be communicated to the wider public by engaging with (and catering to) the logics of online information sharing.The desktop documentary in that regard might therefore not only propose a new way of making ethnographic film, but also a new way to communicate our ethnographic findings.

Filmography Magnússon, J.B. (Producer and Director). (2017). Even Asteroids Are Not Alone. Berlin: Research Area Visual and Media Anthropology. Köhn, S. (Producer and Director). (2015). Intimate Distance. Prague: Doc Alliance Films.

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Steffen Köhn Leandro Goddinho (Producer and Director). (2017). Positive Youtubers. Journal of Visual and Media Anthropology (Online) 3(1).http://www.visual-anthropology.fu-berlin.de/journal/Vol_3 _No_1_2017/ POSITIVE_YOUTUBERS/index.html Wesch, M. (2007). The Machine is Us/ing Us. Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gm P4nk0EOE Skawennati (2008-13). TimeTravellerTM. Retrieved from: http://www.timetravellertm.com Lee, K.B. (2014).Transformers:The Premake. Retrieved from: www.youtube.com /watch?v=dD3K1eWXI54 Hannen,T. (2016).Your Phone is Now a Refugee’s Phone. Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=m1BLsySgsHM

References BBC Media Action. (2016). Voices of refugees. Information and communication needs of refugees in Greece and Germany. Retrieved from http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/mediaaction/pdf/research/voicesof-refugees-research-report.pdf Boellstorff, T. (2008). Coming of age in second life.An anthropologist explores the virtually human. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Boellstorff,T., Nardi B., Pearce, C., & Taylor,T. L. (2012). Ethnography and virtual worlds:A handbook of method. Oxford/Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Boellstorff,T. (2016). For whom the ontology turns:Theorizing the digital real. Current Anthropology, 57(4), 387–407. Brooks, I. G. (2017). Is betrayal in Eve Online unethical? Journal of Virtual Worlds Research, 10(3). doi:10.4101/ jvwr.v10i3.7259 Chen, M. (2012). Leet noobs:The life and death of an expert player group in world of warcraft. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Collins, S. G., & Durington, M. S. (2015). Networked anthropology:A primer for ethnographers. New York, NY/ Abingdon: Routledge. Danilovic, S. (2013).Virtual lens of exposure. Aesthetics, theory, and ethics of documentary filmmaking in second life. In J. Ng (Ed.), Understanding machinima. Essays on filmmaking in virtual worlds (pp. 167–186). London: Bloomsbury Academic. Frömming, U. (Ed.). (2013). Virtual environments and cultures. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Frömming, U., Köhn, S.,Terry, M., & Fox, S. (Eds.). (2017). Digital environments. Ethnographic perspectives across global online and offline spaces. Bielefeld: Transcript. Galloway, A. (2012). The interface effect. Cambridge: Polity. Hine, C. (2015). Ethnography for the Internet: Embedded, embodied and everyday. London: Bloomsbury. Hjorth, L., Horst, H., Galloway, A., & Bell, G. (Eds.). (2017). The Routledge companion to digital ethnography. New York, NY: Routledge. Horst, H., & Miller, D. (Eds.). (2012). Digital anthropology. New York, NY: Berg. Hyndman-Rizk, N. (2014). At home with Skype: New media technologies and social change between Lebanon and the diaspora. In T. Batrouney,T. Boos,A. Escher, & P.Tabar, (Eds.), Palestinian, Lebanese and Syrian communities in the world:Theoretical frameworks and empirical studies (pp. 87–100). Heidelberg:Winter Universitätsverlag. Knox, P. L., & Marston, S. (2012). Human geography: Places and regions in global context (6th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall. Lempert,W. (2018). Indigenous media futures:An introduction. Cultural Anthropology, 33(2), 173–179. Longhurst, R. (2013). Using Skype to mother: Bodies, emotions, visuality, and screens. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 31(4), 664–679. Madianou, M., & Miller, D. (2012). Migration and new media:Transnational families and polymedia. New York, NY/Abington: Routledge. Manovich, L. (2001). The language of new media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Miller, D., & Sinanan, J. (2014). Webcam. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Miller, D., Costa, E., Haynes, N., McDonald,T., Nicolescu, R., Sinanan, J., … Wang, X. (2016). How the world changed social media. London: UCL Press. Nardi, B. (2010). My life as a night elf priest: An anthropological account of world of warcraft. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.

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Screens as film locations Ng, J. (Ed.). (2013). Understanding machinima. Essays on filmmaking in virtual worlds. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Pearce, C. (2009). Communities of play: Emergent cultures in multiplayer games and virtual worlds. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Pink, S., Horst, H., Postill, J., Hjorth, L., Lewis, T., & Tacchi, J. (2015). Digital ethnography: Principles and practice. London: Sage. Taylor,T. L. (2006). Play between worlds: Exploring online game culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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PART 6

Distributing and circulating

Part 6 Introduction The final part of the handbook is dedicated to the act of sharing ethnographic film. While there are video recordings made in the field that are never meant to be shared—either because they are taken in lieu of fieldnotes, or because sharing them could do harm to our research participants—most ethnographic video content can be shared with our audiences in one way or another. Clearly, not all video shot in the field is high in production value and not all video material has the kind of narrative content that most audiences expect and appreciate, but all video can be very useful to supplement and enhance writing.With nearly all academic journals being accessible online, and more and more scholarly books featuring companion websites, research-based video is more convenient to access than ever. My hope is that after reading the chapters contained in Part 6 of this book more scholars, more students, and more thesis supervisors will find the confidence to plan for and execute appropriate circulation plans for whatever video material they may have. We begin with a brilliant lay of the land, provided to us by Harjant Gill in Chapter 26. Building on his own experience, Gill offers practical advice and guidance on how to distribute your ethnographic film in today’s age. No longer restricted to the VHS and DVD distribution market mainly intended for library collections, today’s ethnographic filmmakers have an expanding array of options to distribute their work to precisely targeted audience segments or to the general public. From YouTube and Vimeo to Kanopy, from conferences to film festivals, from independent movie theatre distribution to cinema on demand, and from video on demand (VOD) to subscription video on demand (SVOD) platforms, today’s ethnographic filmmakers are extremely fortunate—compared to our colleagues of the past—to be able to get their work out so widely, quickly, and independently of distributors.And while achieving distribution success is not easy, as Gill writes, with a little bit of forethought and strategic foresight almost anything is possible. In Chapter 27 Gabriel Dattatreyan takes up Gill’s overview and takes it to the next logical step, focusing on the notion and consequences of ethnographic film after it enters a public sphere. More precisely, Dattatreyan focuses on the multiple types of destabilizations to the genre of ethnographic film that arise as a result of films ending up in the hands of unanticipated actors (as well as the typical audiences).What happens, he asks, when ethnographic audio-visual

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material circulates in alternate circuits? What can happen when we ethnographers give greater attention to how digital networks and distribution infrastructures “not only make visible new ethnographically rich forms, correspondences, and actors, but provide us with an opportunity to interrogate the established political economy and aesthetics of ethnographic film”? (Dattatreyan, this book). As many other contributors to the book do in their respective chapters, Dattatreyan provides rich examples to illustrate his arguments and insights. Such instances force us to “rethink our investments in the genre in ways that make clear the political economies at play in the circulation of differently situated audio-visual material” (Dattatreyan, this book). Most of the readers of this handbook are bound to be students. Students who are eager to use video for their graduate research projects, and students who will have to convince a few skeptical supervisors along the way. While more and more university programs accept—and some explicitly welcome or even encourage—video-based research, in 2020 we still live in a largely logocentric academic world. In a logocentric academic world, the written word dominates, and everything else is viewed with skepticism and suspicion. How can a student then navigate these waters, whether at a skeptical or an accepting university? Chapter 28 by Catherine GoughBrady has the answers, based on her own experience and the experiences of a few colleagues who have gone through the process before. If a video-based thesis or dissertation is what you or the student you supervise have chosen to do, then Chapter 28 is one you won’t want to miss. Part 6 ends with Carlo Cubero’s overview of the ethnographic film festival world. Film festivals are events and places where your film can be viewed by its most ideal and engaged audience, but they are also sites where you can develop new professional relationships and expand your networks.As a whole, film festivals play an important role in the ethnographic film world, and in the ethnographic realm writ large. But in selecting or rejecting films ethnographic film festival programmers also effectively write and re-write ethnographic films’ agendas and the definition of ethnographic film in the contemporary times.As Cubero argues the importance of the film festival format has not diminished within the visual anthropology community, its potential for development lies in articulating a trans-disciplinary project for audio-visual ethnography and in creating a space to research the possibilities of different media to convey a sense of an intersubjective experience. (Cubero, this volume)

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26 HOW TO DISTRIBUTE YOUR ETHNOGRAPHIC FILM Harjant S. Gill

Building on nearly two decades of experiences in ethnographic filmmaking and distribution, in this chapter I offer some guidance and advice to practicing ethnographic filmmakers for whom showing their films is equally (if not more) important as making them.These best practices are based on my personal experiences as a documentary and ethnographic filmmaker and include strategies that I learned overtime through trial and error, and from my limited experience as co-director of a couple of ethnographic film festivals. That is to say that you (readers of this essay) should take what follows with a grain of salt and be selective about how to promote and distribute your film. My hope is to encourage aspiring ethnographic filmmakers like you to come up with your own distribution strategy that meets your needs considering how you envision your scholarship circulating beyond the academy. In the grand scheme of things (as you will soon discover), getting a “distribution deal” is not nearly as important as you might imagine. However, it is paramount that you keep developing your practice; to keep showing your ethnographic films wherever possible, to keep circulating the products of your scholarly labor and artistic expressions. On countless occasions I have seen promising films at film festival and academic conferences that have the potential to make important contributions to the humanities.Yet, more often than not, filmmakers give up on distributing and sharing their works after a few disappointing attempts. Rejection by a funder, a festival programmer, or a distributor can be a painful blow to one’s ego, dissuading filmmakers from ever showing their films publicly again. However as I explain in this chapter, most of these decisions about programming and acquisitions have little to do with the quality of submissions, rather they reflect a scarcity of resources within a “traditional” humanities landscape struggling to make sense of these new, dynamic, and increasingly popular forms of scholarly engagements and storytelling (including ethnographic films). Most social scientists I know make terrible salesmen. We are not trained to promote our work, to be our own cheerleaders. The bottom-line remains that it is simply not enough to just produce an ethnographic film. We must also assume additional responsibilities of promoting, circulating, and often distributing our own films. Unlike book-length ethnographies and peer-reviewed journal articles that benefit from existing infrastructures of circulation (academic publishers, online databases, etc.), as of writing of this essay, I can count on one hand the number of established companies in the United States that distribute ethnographic films and educational documentaries. While new online streaming databases and services have emerged 281

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as another venue for showcasing ethnographic films, access to entry into these venues remain restricted. Given these realities of academic knowledge circulation, ethnographic filmmakers must be proactive in promoting and circulating their own films, and enter into this enterprise with realistic understanding and expectations of the additional labor required in producing a successful ethnographic film. In the sections that follow, I offer some suggestions and guidelines for doing just that. Breaking down the often-illusive process of “film distribution” into three distinct phases—promotion and publicity; broadcast, festival and academic screenings; commercial release and academic circulation—I hope to demystify this process for novice filmmakers and hopefully inspire you to share your scholarly output and art as widely as possible.

Planning for distribution There are a handful of action-items that should be on every filmmaker’s “to-do” list that can have a tremendous impact on a film’s distribution potential, and these tasks should be planned for during pre-production, even if they are to be executed while the cameras are rolling, or while the film is in the edit room.

Length, format, and style Just as experienced ethnographers design research projects with more than a vague idea of what the eventual outcome of their research is going to look like (a peer-reviewed journal article, or an academic book, or a mass-market paperback written for non-academic audiences), during pre-production, you should have some idea of how your films might appear and circulate.These choices regarding shooting format, film length, and cinematic style will have an outsized impact on the distribution potential of your film.1 For instance, my 2007 film Milind Soman Made Me Gay, which started out as a final project in a documentary production course that I took in graduate school, differs significantly in style and form from my more recent films. Inspired by Marlon Riggs’ Tongues Untied (1989), Trinh T Minh-Ha’s Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1989) and Pratibha Parmar’s Khush (1991), filmmakers who deeply shaped my approach to ethnographic filmmaking, Milind Soman Made Me Gay is much more of a conceptual and performative film. In the film, I interweave and overlay traditional interview footage with images, text, and sensory elements to evoke nostalgia and longing for homeland, and produces an affective experience of being openly queer in South Asian diaspora.The film is an assemblage of original and archival footage shot on different cameras, in different formats, and at different times. Even though Milind Soman Made Me Gay enjoyed a very successful run at various LGBTQ and South Asian themed film festivals, my distributor (Frameline) had very little success in programming the film for broadcast on television, mainly because some of the footage used in the film did not meet the standards required for broadcasting. Instead Frameline largely distributed the film on DVD to university libraries and educational institutions. Only recently, Frameline made the film available for instant streaming on Amazon Prime. In contrast to Milind Soman Made Me Gay, when I set out to make my subsequent film Roots of Love (2011), first in the “Indian Masculinity Trilogy” that I filmed in India between 2010 and 2015, my goal was to make a film that would circulate among wider audiences across the subcontinent. I teamed up with PSBT (Public Service Broadcasting Trust) who exclusively produce programming for Doordarshan, India’s national television channel. PSBT ended up funding Roots of Love, and the two films that followed Mardistan/Macholand (2014) and Sent Away Boys (2016) in exchange for exclusive broadcasting rights to show the three films on television in India. 282

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Unlike a traditional documentary distributor like Frameline, PSBT promised me flexibility in regards to how and where I could show my film outside of India and allowed me to make all three films available open-access (for free) on popular streaming platforms including YouTube and Vimeo. Knowing that these films were going to screen on television informed the kind of choices I made in regards to style, form, and format when planning to make these three films. PSBT stipulates that their short films must be between 25 and 30 minutes in length, must be filmed on broadcast quality high definition (HD) video with stereo-quality sounds, and all on-screen text must meet the technical specification set forth by Doordarshan. Stylistically, these three films borrow heavily from the polished and stark aesthetics popularized by TV shows like This American Life (2007–2009). Unlike with the experimental and performative sensibilities of Milind Soman Made Me Gay, the three films closely adhere to the conventions of television documentary albeit being informed nonetheless by my ethnographic research and cultural sensibilities as a South Asian filmmaker. Before I could show my films within India, I also had to obtain a censor certification from India’s Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC). These perimeters informed my creative approach and content included within each film, and ultimately, I ended up making two slightly different versions of each of the three films; one adhering to Doordarshan and CBFC’s guidelines in regard to length and content for audiences within India, and the other version, the uncensored “director’s cut,” for international film festivals and online streaming (Gill, 2017). Planning for such eventualities during pre-production allowed to me make decisions during production and post-production that would not jeopardize its distribution prospects. Before starting production, I encourage you to envision the primary audience of your films, and to write your project proposals and treatments keeping your primary audiences in mind, actively imagining how and where your films will be shown.

Permissions and releases In an ideal world, as ethnographers and researchers, we would provide all of our participants with “informed consent,” expect them to read and understand it fully, and sign it, leaving behind a copy for their records.This is easier said than done, and even ethnographers with the sincerest intentions fall short of this aspirational goal. In my own experience, researching in remote corners of India, I am frequently working with individuals with limited Hindi or English literacy skills or only fluent in regional languages (Gill, 2014b).While filming, I often end up scrambling to translate the informed consent and “personal release” before asking my participant to trust me, and sign a document in a language they cannot fully read or understand. Setting aside the discussion of consent and other ethical dilemmas around ethnographic research and filming, which have been explored elsewhere (Perry and Marion, 2010), falling short on obtaining the necessary personal and location releases for a film can severely limit its distribution potential. Most credible broadcasters and distributors expect signed and dated personal releases from all major participants featured in the film, with specific language that gives the filmmaker and/ or their production companies the right to circulate their participants’ images and words for commercial purposes. Similar expectations also extend to any private locations featured in a film, for which the filmmakers must obtain “location releases.” As part of pre-production, it is incredibly important to draft personal releases and location releases using specific language that includes broadcast rights, online streaming rights, educational distribution rights etc., above all, in a manner that is legally binding.While filming, I prioritize these documents by assigning this important task of obtaining releases to my assistant director or line producer, and when working 283

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with individuals with limited English literacy, we often obtain on-camera (oral) releases in their native language in addition to signed hard-copies of any releases and informed consent forms. Along with personal and location releases, similar consent (whenever possible) must be obtained from authors of any original artwork featured in a film.These include original paintings, film clips, music, and other artistic forms that have commercial value and/or are protected by copyright laws.An “artwork release” must be obtained in most of these cases, however there exist limited exceptions for the use of artwork as a form of critique under “fair use” laws and guidelines.2 Most importantly, filmmakers should avoid recording copyrighted music when filming in public spaces, like cafés, bars, gymnasiums, etc. Speaking from personal experience, most novice filmmakers run afoul of this legal requirement while choosing how to score their film, and which songs to include in the film’s soundtrack. After being shut out of distribution opportunities for two of my earlier films because of my inability to secure rights for the previously released music featured in both films, I have scored my subsequent films only with original songs and music composed specifically for each film in collaboration with the featured artists. In addition to artwork releases, I also sign legally binding contracts with these musicians that document the compensation they received for their contributions. Needless to mention, making these decisions part of the “pre-production” planning will ensure a payoff during postproduction and distribution. No credible film distributor will consider distributing a film where rights to music featured within the film are not already secured.

Publicity kit Given that viewers will most likely first encounter your film via a single image (e.g., a poster, a postcard, a film still in festival programs), most novice filmmakers fail to shoot compelling high-quality stills featuring their participants that could be used to design an impressive attention-grabbing cover. Distributors, whose primary goal is to sell your film, are more likely to turn down submissions that are not accompanied by high-quality images that they can use in their promotional materials. Along with other rookie mistakes, while making my first two films Everything (2001) and Some Reasons for Living (2003), I made the mistake of not getting any high-quality stills featuring my participants that convey the essence of the two films. Instead, I supplied film festivals and potential distributors with “screengrabs” from the films. These screengrabs rarely made it into festival programs and left a tepid impression compared to stunning high-quality images representing other films featured in the same program. I recognized the importance of obtaining image(s) that are both visually captivating and embody the essence of the film and its major themes. From that point on, I made obtaining compelling print-quality publicity stills (300 dpi or more), shot on a still camera in a variety of orientations (portrait, landscape, etc.) a priority during production. Now, when planning for production, I make sure to include a photoshoot with my participants as part of my shot-list for the day, and procure the necessary camera equipment needed for it in advance (see Figures 26.1, 26.2, and 26.3). Whereas a compelling film still and cover art is essential to capturing the programmer’s, the distributor’s, and ultimately the viewer’s attention, a memorable title and a pithy short synopsis (a two-line description of your film) is integral to drawing them in further. In film school and mainstream filmmaking, the short synopsis is also referred to as an “elevator pitch”: a hypothetical scenario where a filmmaker imagines themselves to be sharing an elevator with a potential funder or distributor, and they only have a few short minutes until the elevator doors open to introduce themselves and sell their film project. Given our propensity for thick description ethnographers are notoriously bad at writing short synopses that can work as effective eleva284

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Figure 26.1

Cover art for Mardistan/Macholand. Harjant Gill.

tor pitches.We tend to over-explain, offer the “big-picture,” and spend time talking about our overall process.While a discussion of process is an important facet of ethnographic filmmaking, and should be included elsewhere in the publicity kit, the short synopsis must offer a gripping insight into your film that intrigues the reader enough to want to see the film. I too am terrible at writing compelling short synopses and have spent a lot of time perfecting this illusive skill. I often enlist my students, my colleagues, and my friends (who are unfamiliar with the film) to help me workshop my short synopsis as well as the film’s title. In addition to publicity stills and synopsis, a publicity kit can also include a detailed synopsis, director bio and headshot, director’s statement, screening history, excerpts from notable reviews, links to online trailer, etc. Some distributors might ask for cast and crew stills (images that document the making of the film) that can be used in press about the film.Also note that print quality stills (300 dpi) are often difficult to transmit via email because of their size. I recommend uploading your publicity kit to a virtual folder that can be easily accessed via a shareable URL. In addition to emailing the URL whenever someone requests materials related to my films, I have also embedded hyperlinks to publicity kits onto my films’ web pages, which can be found easily by a quick google search. I update my website routinely with up-to-date information about film screenings, reviews, and supplementary materials (e.g., HarjantGill.com). 285

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Figure 26.2 Cover art for Sent Away Boys. Harjant Gill.

The purpose of creating a professional looking press kit and an accompanying website is to generate interest in your film, and to create what many in the film-industry refer to as “buzz,” which would ultimately enhance your film’s distribution and circulation prospects. Fortunately, generating buzz for your film no longer costs what it used to before high-speed Internet and social media became so easily accessible. With very little resources, you too can promote your film across multiple social media platforms, solicit advance reviews and excerpts from other, more established, filmmakers and subject experts in your fields, and even make your films more accessible to a wider audience if you choose the “self-distribution” model.

Film festivals and academic conferences Having shown my films at over 120 academic and non-academic film festivals worldwide, juried three and co-directed/curated two ethnographic film festivals, the most important advice I offer a novice filmmaker, advice that is frequently ignored, is to never (ever!) submit your film to a film festival until you are completely finished with post-production (editing, sound-mixing, color-correction, subtitle, graphics, etc.) and your film is ready to be seen publicly. Motivated by the desire to meet festival deadlines, filmmakers frequently submit unfinished versions of their films, perhaps with an explanation of work that remains to be completed. Aside from the 286

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Figure 26.3

Cover art for Roots of Love. Harjant Gill.

fact that an unfinished film will be inherently disadvantaged against other finished submissions, even the most generous and understanding festival programmers might hesitate to program an incomplete submission fearing that it might not be finished in time for the film festival. A sympathetic programmer might reject the film with the recommendation for the film to be resubmitted upon completion, perhaps the following year. Even when this is the case, the resubmission is more likely to be disadvantaged as it has to work against the initial impressions formed by the incomplete version the previous year, and it lacks the element of pleasant surprise, the “wow” factor, that programmers frequently rely upon when reviewing festival submissions. Since the mid-1970’s, ethnographic film festivals have been integral to circulating ethnographic cinema (Vallejo and Peirano, 2017; also see Cubero, this book), and despite a recent increase in the number of ethnographic film festivals and conferences that are organized each year, the number of submissions far outnumber the festivals and total programing time available to showcase ethnographic films. For instance, between 2012 and 2014, the three years I co-directed the Society for Visual Anthropology’s Film and Media Festival, our submission numbers grew from 141 films to 215 films while the programing hours allotted to us remained relatively the same. In 2012 we programmed 45 films, in 2014 we could only program 53 of the 215 submissions. Each year the festival programmers and jurors have to make the difficult 287

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decision to reject submissions that are otherwise superb, yet do not make the cut in terms of running time, festival theme, and/or when competing against other more exceptional and/or timely films. In this section, I discuss some additional best practices that will help you develop a successful festival strategy, enhancing your film’s prospect of being programmed at film festivals and eventually getting distributed. Most filmmakers and editors are perfectionists, and festival deadlines are often useful in motiving us to complete our films. However, this also means that we wait till until the last possible moment to submit our films. Long after the “regular deadline” has passed, we gladly pay extra for the privilege of submitting our films in time for the “late deadline.” As a result, programmers are inundated with submissions toward the end of the submission cycle, when they are less likely to devote the kind of attention your submission would get if submitted early, perhaps if submitted before the “early deadline.” Submitting early also has the added benefit of saving money on submission fees, as they tend to be lower to incentivize filmmakers to submit early. I recommend making a spreadsheet of film festivals that interest you and might seem receptive to your film, along with deadlines and submission fees for up to a year in advance as part of successful festival strategy. Depending on what is the ultimate goal of taking your film on the “festival circuit,” showing it at various film festivals over two to three years, you should prioritize your submissions accordingly. For most non-academic documentarians, the goal is to get mainstream distribution, win major awards, and attain commercial success. Hence, they prioritize “A-list” film festivals like Sundance,Telluride,Tribeca, South by South West,Toronto International Film Festival, etc. which are harder to get into and are attended by “industry people” (Artis, 2014, pp. 323–330, Jolliffe and Zinnes, 2012, pp. 300–339). For an academic ethnographer like me, whose primary goal is to have my film be seen and recognized by my peers, I prioritized academic film festivals and conferences, submitting my films to festivals like Margaret Mead Film Festival, Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI), Viscult, Ethnografilm, the Society for Visual Anthropology Film and Media Festival (SVAFMF), Taiwan International Ethnographic Film Festival, etc. (Vallejo and Peirano, 2017, pp. 21–26). While these are not as flashy as the “A-List” festivals, these have been equally important to me in leveraging tenure and promotion at my university. Filmmaking is equally integral to my outreach as a public anthropologist, and I make my films primarily for non-academic audiences including communities in India where I conduct research. Therefore, I also submit my films to niche film festivals where I have opportunities for wider public engagement. These include Indian, South Asian or Asian film festivals, LGBTQ film festivals, and film festivals on the theme of gender. Even within niche festivals circuits, some film festivals are ranked higher in prestige than others, perhaps because they have been around longer. It goes without saying that you should prioritize these over the less prestigious (newer) ones when crafting your festival submission strategy.While it might not be stated explicitly in festival guidelines, many prestigious film festivals expect to be the first ones to showcase your film, referred to as a “premiere.” Having already “premiered” your film at a smaller, less prestigious film festival can jeopardize your chances to be accepted into the more prestigious ones. Some basic research—emails to festival programmers, looking at past programs and festival websites—can offer more insight into whether a given film festival expects a premiere or not. In the event your film is accepted into two competing film festivals, it is perfectly okay to ask the festival director or programmer for a deferment, so you can save your “premiere” status for the more prestigious festival that expects it as a pre-condition for including (and highlighting) your film in their program. In addition to including a stellar publicity kit (with a memorable title and a pithy synopsis, and captivating film stills) along with your submission, I recommend including keywords or 288

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themes that might help programmers to easily recall your film, and categorize it into festivals’ themes.These keywords can include geographical or cultural categories, issues explored within the film, and/or the film’s stylistic approach. For example, Milind Soman Made Me Gay was often categorized using the following keywords: South Asia; Diaspora; Queer; Immigration; Conceptual; Auto-Ethnographic; Experimental. Doing some preliminary research on the festival, including looking up program themes from previous years can prove helpful in determining if the festival is the right fit for your film, and thereby worthy of your time and money. I also recommend creating multiple versions of your film, especially if your film is over two hours long. Based on my experience programming SVAFMF and conversations with other festival programmers, longer films are generally harder to program. Creating multiple versions, a “theatrical cut” and a “director’s cut” is a common practice in documentary cinema, and the most recent example of this includes the 2012 Oscar-nominated film The Act of Killing which was released as a 122-minute-long theatrical cut, followed by a director’s cut that clocks in at 159 minutes.

Negotiating distribution Signing a distribution deal with a reputable educational film distributor is similar to signing a book contract with a well-regarded university press in the sense that it confers upon your film (and you as the filmmaker) credibility and prestige associated with other films already part of the distributor’s catalog. Spending some time researching a potential distributor’s catalog of films to identify major themes and areas of specialization will allow you to identify a distributor who is an ideal fit for you and your film. Having Milind Soman Made Me Gay acquired by Frameline— the nation’s leading LGBTQ documentary distributor, which also distributes Marlon Riggs’ Tongues Untied (a film that played a seminal role in shaping my artistic sensibilities)—was very important to me, given that my film also explores similar themes of racism, homophobia, displacement, and belonging as Riggs’ film. In this way, Frameline was an ideal fit for my documentary despite Frameline’s lack of specialization in anthropological cinema. My partnership with Frameline has been extremely fulfilling and remains one of the greatest achievements of my artistic career.Yet, it only came after failing to secure distribution for my previous three films, including the 2004 film Mission Movie which took over two years to make and went on to win several awards, but ultimately was subjugated to the realm of ephemerality, never to be seen in public again (Gill, 2019). Even though film distributors are similar to university presses in how they acquire, promote, distribute, and share profits from the sale of your film, the two are fundamentally different because there are a lot fewer of them (film distributors),3 and they often operate on smaller budgets as licensing fees and DVD sales to university libraries are not as lucrative as book sales to individual students. Given this scarcity, having your film passed over by a major distributor is quite common, and should not be seen as a reflection on the value of your film and by extension, your worth as a filmmaker. In addition to the strategies outlined above, below are some insights that I have garnered over the last 15 years that might help demystify the distribution process while encouraging you to consider some rewarding alternatives to “mainstream” distribution. Just like film festival programmers, individuals in charge of acquiring new content (usually called acquisitions directors) are inundated with high-quality submissions, from which they are tasked with selecting only a sliver. You should never (ever!) submit an unfinished film. Most distributors are likely to give one sincere opportunity to assessing your film, and you want your film to look and sound perfect, on screen as well as how it is packaged (DVD cover, publicity kit, etc.). Some distributors also expect your films to accompany a close-captioned option. All reputable distributors will expect that you have already secured the necessary clearances and 289

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permissions for individuals, places, and artwork featured in the film including music licenses before offering to acquire your film (Jolliffe and Zinnes, 2012, pp. 342–383). There exists a misnomer that the responsibility of promoting your film, submitting it to film festivals and academic conferences is assumed entirely by your distributor after you have secured a distribution deal. Following this logic, it makes most sense to pursue a distribution deal before festival screenings. This might be true for films made by established filmmakers, however for novice filmmakers, festival screenings, recognitions and awards play an essential role in making your film more attractive for distribution. Films that appear across multiple programs and that are featured prominently at top film festivals and scholarly conferences are more likely to attract distributors’ interest. Attending film festivals screenings, participating in post-screening discussions, and networking at social events sponsored by the film festivals also offer a unique opportunity to meet the distributors (and their representatives) in person and develop a relationship with them, which is likely to influence their decision to acquire your film. Distributors frequently rely on word-of-mouth recommendations from film festival staff and volunteers when determining what to watch, therefore it is important that you network with not only the distributors, but also the festival staff and volunteers, be friendly and gracious toward them, help promote your screening by passing out postcards and flyers and thereby creating a buzz around your film. At my film screenings, I often carry DVDs and postcards of my films, and hand them out liberally to potential distributors, other programmers, or academics who express interest in viewing my work but are unable to attend the screening, perhaps due to scheduling conflicts. I recommend you do the same and not be too selective about who you supply a copy of your film to. Post festival follow-up emails are essential in developing these relationships and networks. A more traditional educational distributor like Documentary Educational Resources (DER) is likely to request exclusive distribution rights to your films, which primarily includes selling your film to university libraries and to online screening databases and individual DVD sales (via their website) for a set period of time (five to ten years on average). In exchange, you can expect to receive royalty checks from the distributor at regular intervals. Royalties represent your percentage of the profits based on the overall sale of your film, though this figure does not reflect just sales itself. Often distributors deduct the cost of promoting and circulating your film before any profit is calculated. Most documentary filmmakers, myself included, do not expect to sustain our careers based on the sale of our films. Unfortunately, given the niche interest and circulation of ethnographic film, our royalty checks even fall short of our modest expectations. While Milind Soman Made Me Gay went on to become one of the more popular titles in Frameline’s catalog during the five- year-period of contract I negotiated with the organization, ultimately my royalties averaged out to be around $1000 per year over the course of those first five years, during which my film was sold exclusively on DVD and to subscription-based online steaming services like Alexander Street Press and Kanopy. After my five-year contract ended, I renegotiated the terms of my contract permitting Frameline to avail the film on popular video streaming services including Amazon Prime. Frameline has also made it available for free (on YouTube) as part of its “Frameline Voices” initiative that aims to give more visibility to diverse LGBTQ stories with “an emphasis on films by and about people of color, trans and genderexpansive persons, youth, and elders.”This meant that my film did not generate nearly as much income as it did during the first five years of its release (I agreed to forgo proportional payout of royalties in exchange for a small stipend). However, these terms also made the film more accessible as an educational resource for anyone to view from any part of the world. As an educator, filmmaker, and public anthropologist, the latter is more important than any additional financial compensation I might have realized from the circulation of my films. 290

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As you negotiate agreements and contracts with a distributor who has expressed interest in acquiring your film, consider where and how you want your films to be shown and what is most important to you;Accessibility? Compensation? Credibility? Independence? Prestige? For these reasons and other limitations of standard distribution contracts, many accomplished ethnographic filmmakers I know have chosen to self-distribute their films via their website, Amazon, and/or Vimeo.4 Over the last decade, as the landscape of distribution has shifted from VHS/ DVD sales directly to university libraries to a more subscription-based model, making your film available via online streaming services, more “hybrid” distribution models, or self-distribution is becoming increasingly popular. New Day Films, a co-operatively run distribution company that allows filmmakers more autonomy over how their films are priced, marketed, and distributed to educational markets is one such example of a hybrid model. New Day Films’ website also features its own streaming platform that allows for individual pay-per-view screening of their films, in addition to making their films available through subscription-based platforms such as Kanopy, which are marketed toward universities and colleges.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have shared almost everything I know about how to navigate the unfamiliar terrains of ethnographic film circulation and distribution. The last, and perhaps the most important advice I can offer is that you don’t have to (or rather, you must not) undertake this journey alone. For me, filmmaking is one of the most rewarding endeavors not only because it is a medium through which I am able tell the stories that I want to tell, but because it also gives me the opportunity to collaborate with immensely talented and creative individuals who play a seminal role in the success of my films, from conception to distribution. Knowing when to seek help and relying on others’ expertise in every phase of film production (including distribution) is essential to your film’s success. I strongly encourage you to identify collaborators, perhaps another filmmaker or an intern or a student, who can help you with different tasks associated with circulation and distribution. What I have outlined in this chapter are piecemeal solutions to larger structural issues that include the devaluation of our efforts and labor as scholars and filmmakers by the very same institutions and markets that are built upon and sustained by the circulation of our scholarship. I do not have a solution to these conundrums, however I want to encourage you to approach these limitations as opportunities, to disrupt the status quo, to come up with your own circulation and distribution model that is ideal for your film and your professional development. Moving forward, emergence of new media of circulation, especially online streaming, is opening up new opportunities for ethnographic filmmakers to make and show our film on our own terms. As experiments with emergent technologies such as immersive 360 virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AI) video leads to new forms of ethnographic storytelling and multimodal scholarly output, further disruptions to traditional models of ethnographic film circulation and distribution are inevitable (Collins et al., 2017).

Notes 1 See Vannini (2015, pp. 397–403) for a longer discussion on format, content, and style of ethnographic documentaries. 2 See “Documentary Filmmaker’s Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use” published by Center for Media and Social Impact at American University School of Communication for more information and discussion on fair use.

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Harjant S. Gill 3 List of major distributors of ethnographic media (in alphabetical order): Berkeley Media; Bullfrog Films; California Newsreel; The Cinema Guild; Documentary Educational Resources; Ethnographic Video Online; First Run Features; Frameline; Good Docs; Icarus Films; New Day Films; Royal Anthropological Institute;Third World Newsreel;Vision Maker Media;Women Make Movies. 4 Examples include Bethel (2007) and A Japanese Funeral (2010) by Karen Nakamura and Please Don’t Beat Me, Sir! (2011) by P. Kerim Friedman and Shashwati Talukdar (2011).

References Artis, A. (2014). Shut Up and Shoot (2nd ed.). Burlington, MA: Focal Press. Collins, S., Durington, M., & Gill, H. (2017). Multimodality:An Invitation. American Anthropologist, 119(1), 142–146. Friedman, K., & Talukdar, S. (2011). Please Don’t Beat Me, Sir! Woodstock, NY: Four Nine and Half Pictures. Gill, H. (2001). Everything. San Francisco, CA:Tilotama Productions. Gill, H. (2003). Some Reasons for Living. San Francisco, CA:Tilotama Productions. Gill, H. (2007). Milind Soman Made Me Gay. San Francisco, CA: Frameline. Gill, H. (2011). Roots of Love. New Delhi: Public Service Broadcasting Trust. Gill, H. (2014a). Mardistan/Macholand. New Delhi: Public Service Broadcasting Trust. Gill, H. (2014b). Before Picking up the Camera: My process to ethnographic film. Anthropology Now, 6, 72–80. Gill, H. (2016). Sent Away Boys. New Delhi: Public Service Broadcasting Trust. Gill, H. (2017). Censorship and Ethnographic Film: Confronting homophobia, state bureaucracies and cultural regulation in India. Visual Anthropology Review, 33(1), 62–73. Gill, H. (2019). Degentrifying Documentary and Ethnographic Cinemas: Displacement of communitybased storytelling in San Francisco’s Mission District. Pluralities, 1(1), 1-6. Retrieved from https://www. pluralities.org/01/06 Glass, I. (2007–2009). This American Life (TV series). Los Angeles, CA: Showtime. Jolliffe, G., & Zinnes, A. (2012). The Documentary Filmmaker’s Handbook (2nd ed.). London: Continuum International Publishing Group. Nakamura, K. (2007). Bethel. Berkeley, CA:Amazon.com. Nakamura, K. (2010). A Japanese Funeral. Berkeley, CA:Amazon.com. Oppenheimer, J. (2012). Act of Killing.Austin,TX: Drafthouse Films. Parmar, P. (1991). Khush. New York City:Women Make Movies. Perry, S., & Marion, J. (2010). State of Ethics in Visual Anthropology. Visual Anthropology Review, 26(2), 96–104. Riggs, M. (1989). Tongues Untied. San Francisco, CA: Frameline. Swenson, L. (2004). Mission Movie/Una Película de la Misión. San Francisco, CA: Left Coast Films Trinh T. M. H. (1989). Surname Viet Given Name Nam. New York City:Women Make Movies. Vallejo,A., & Paz Peirano, M. (Eds.). (2017). Film Festivals and Anthropology. Cambridge Scholar Publishing. Vannini, P. (2015). Ethnographic Film and Video on Hybrid Television: Learning from the content, style, and distribution of popular ethnographic documentaries. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 44(4), 391–416.

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27 CIRCULATING ETHNOGRAPHIC FILMS IN THE DIGITAL AGE Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan

Whereas Harjant Gill’s following chapter offers a solid blueprint for how to approach circulating a completed ethnographic film in established infrastructures of circulation—the documentary and ethnographic film festival circuit, for instance—this chapter troubles the very category of ethnographic film through an attention to filmic and audio-visual circulation more broadly. In what follows I focus on the kinds of genre destabilizations that result when unanticipated actors (as well as the usual suspects) produce audio-visual material that can and should be considered ethnographic and circulate this work in alternate circuits.Vannini (2015) recently argued that the sheer volume of televised popular content that could be considered ethnographic should push academic ethnographers to critically think through and learn from this content toward reimagining the genre. I extend Vannini's (2015) argument by pushing for greater attention to how digital networks and infrastructures of circulation and distribution not only make visible new ethnographically rich forms, correspondences, and actors, but provide us with an opportunity to interrogate the established political economy and aesthetics of ethnographic film. I begin with a discussion regarding the importance of broadening the definition of ethnographic film to recognize a diversity of audio-visual content made possible in today’s digital media ecology. If we take seriously Borgan’s (2013, p. 28) suggestion that “ethnographic film production blurs with video and new forms of mechanical and electronic reproduction,” then we should ask what should be the terms of engagement for a conversation about ethnographically rich audio-visual material and their circulations? Equally important: how might we reimagine ethnographic film when we engage with cinema produced by Indigenous and diasporic groups that are now circulated online? Ginsburg (1995) argued over two decades ago that we should embrace the parallax effect that comes with taking seriously the creative, genre-breaking, self-representational projects of those who were previously the subjects of a colonial anthropological project. How does an engagement with the astonishing variety of contemporary ethnographically rich audio-visual material produced and circulated by Indigenous and diasporic creatives rearticulate Ginsberg’s (1995) call and Rouch’s (2003) vision? In the second part of this short chapter I engage with examples of a few projects that help us think through how we might reimagine what constitutes ethnographic film when we take as our starting point questions of circulation and its concomitant concerns of authorship and authority. Each of these examples push us, I believe, to re-think our investments in the genre in ways that make clear the political economies at play in the circulation of differently situated 293

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audio-visual material. Ultimately, I call for a return to Weinberger’s (1992) description of ethnographic film as one “without limit, a process with unlimited possibility, an artefact with unlimited variation” (p. 55) and suggest that this capacious way of thinking might more readily capture the opportunities and challenges of producing and engaging with critically engaged ethnographic audio-visual content in the digital age.

Troubling the category of ethnographic film To discuss ethnographic film and the ethics of its distribution and circulation in the twenty-first century brings us back to the question of how we define ethnographic film as a genre in the first place. As Heider (2006) famously asks, what is the ethnographicness of ethnographic film? Many of the historical debates in anthropology around ethnographic film, as Basu (2008) notes, have centered on the tension between written and visual ethnographic accounts and whether or not the filmic medium, as it captures social life, is scientific enough when compared to written text. In these debates, producing ethnographicness through film is imagined as already always linked to a logocentric, explanatory project (Spitulnik Vidali, 2016).Visual anthropologists had to justify their approaches within this framework, not only in written responses to the critiques of naïve realism that anthropologists who trafficked in the written word leveled against them (see Hastrup, 1992) but, implicitly, in the audio-visual work that they generated. Ethnographic film (and photography) either became the refutation of an epistemological orientation toward theoretical and conceptual models or an attempt to illustrate them for educational purposes (Vannini, 2015). Debates that pit the authority of filmic ethnographies against textual ones, of course, are too many and too complex to recount here. What is important is how, historically, ethnographic film, as a category and an endeavor, was narrowed in scope as a result of these debates. For instance, Ruby (1975), in an effort to establish the scientific authority of ethnographic film, doubled down on defining ethnographic film in relation to the logocentricity of the discipline. He argued that the discipline needed to think of ethnographic films as scientific products in their own right. Moreover, he suggested that the project for anthropologists interested in making ethnographic films was to constitute a genre that had a scientifically rigorous stylistic form distinct from other non-fiction genres. While Ruby acknowledged that all films (fiction and non-fiction) had an ethnographic quality to them in so far as they described and animated social life, ethnographic films had to appear distinct and unmistakably anthropological. Moreover, he argued later in his career that for a non-fiction film to be called ethnographic it needed to have an anthropologist, at the very least, on board during production (Ruby, 1991). Now, to be fair to Ruby (1991), his call for a distinct genre of anthropological filmmaking was not simply a retreading of anthropological authority.As MacDougall (1994) explains, Ruby was invested in making ethnographic film as a vehicle to do something other than describe or analyze. MacDougall (1994), in his own exegesis on the matter, argues that for a film to be considered anthropological it had to theorize differently. MacDougall and Ruby, each in their own way, essentially called for an anthropological cinema that offered a different way of seeing and hearing through the affective cadences of image and sound.While MacDougall (1994) was invested in an observational approach that offered a nuanced, reflexive, and careful engagement with social worlds, Ruby, especially in his later years, pushed for experimentation and risktaking in the genre (2008) and materialized his changing interests in his long-term multimedia project Oak Park Stories (Ruby, 2007; also see Pink, 2009). In important ways Ruby’s (1991) push to re-think ethnographic film and its aesthetic, method, and engagement opened the door for recent discussions that highlight the potential294

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ity of experimentation through montage (e.g., Suhr and Willerslev, 2012). It remains the case that, despite efforts and reimagining form, ethnographic film continues to be a genre that has invested itself in making films about “anthropological topics” (MacDougall, 1994), albeit with varying agendas across the social sciences. This, of course, has meant that what constitutes an ethnographic film has reified what social scientific disciplines at large—and anthropology first and foremost—have pushed against for the last 30 years or so: the notion of a bounded Other.As Vannini (2015) suggests, “for some (invariably, anthropologists), ethnographic film must always represent the ways of life of non-Western people” (p. 394, see also Crawford and Turton, 1992; Ruby, 2000). For the purposes of this discussion, it is safe to say that if we start with a first assumption that the ethnographicness of ethnographic films is defined by and large by an outdated and politically problematic object of study and whether (or not) anthropologists have been involved in the project, then who gets imagined as an audience and how the film circulates becomes a very limited proposition. As importantly, the audio-visual format of an ethnographic film is defined quite specifically as well. It is a single screen engagement that has a defined run time (feature or short) and a particular and peculiar understanding of story/narrative. I will come back to this point a bit later but, very briefly, what becomes important in this definition is that audiovisual work that does not fit into the prefigured definition of film has a hard time finding itself included in an ethnographic film festival. Let us take film festivals as an obvious example of how these first assumptions play out. Films made by anthropologists (or, at the very least, shaped by them) would find their natural home in the dozen or so events hosted around the world that call themselves ethnographic film festivals or were founded as such.These events such as The SVA Film Festival, the Margaret Meade Film Festival, the Jean Rouch Film Festival,The Taiwan Ethnographic Film Festival,The Royal Anthropological Film Festival, Ethnografilm (Paris), IFEF, Ethnocinea, GIEFF, SIEFF, Cineblend and so on (the majority of which are located in Europe or North America).We would engage with these festivals as the sites by which to imagine and engage with the genre. Ethnographic film as a stylistic enterprise, if we only looked at these festivals, would then reveal a particular form or aesthetic sensibility, as I imagine Ruby might have hoped for. Judges of the festival would, no doubt, screen submissions with a criterion in mind that favors observational modes of engagement.These approaches to a reflexive realist representation (Loizos, 1992), as they have evolved and cross-pollinated with various cinematic traditions over the years, are multiple and varied but share in their commitment to eschew more didactic documentary style that rely on interviews as well as more experimental, non-linear, and hybrid forms. Ethnographic film festivals, in this sense, re-authorize anthropologist filmmakers as a particular kind of cultural storyteller—potentially re-inscribing ethnographic film and anthropology as a project that continues to reproduce a colonial gaze that is, undoubtedly, committed to mimetically depicting “the real” of elsewhere and the ontology of otherwise. One simply has to look at the 2019 films included in the RAI Film Festival, where I had the honor of being a festival judge, to see what gets included as part of an anthropological/ethnographic film festival and what sorts of disruptions of a normalized program become possible.1 In this festival year, for instance, organizers took pains to make sure that the work of Senegalese anthropologist and filmmaker Safi Faye was highlighted, pushing for a de-canonizing approach to ethnographic film and whom could be included in its canon.The move to highlight Safi Faye’s work was, perhaps, in response to the previous RAI Film Festivals tone-deaf celebration of Jean Rouch during the 2017 festival—when they assembled a panel of four white male anthropologists to discuss and celebrate the oeuvre of Rouch’s filmic contributions (see Santos, 2017). While this move to celebrate Safi Faye’s work is important and timely, it is also telling that her body of work is 295

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recoverable precisely because she can be seen as an anthropologist who engages with ethnologically relevant topics utilizing a recognizable observational approach. Of course, these days anthropologists who make films do not just have the ethnographic film festival circuit as their primary means to circulate their films. Indeed, there are now hundreds of festivals across the world that accept documentary and experimental work. There are also dedicated documentary film festivals as well as festivals that focus on a specific theme or with a particular notion of community. The efflorescence of non-fiction film festivals or film festivals that have included a category for non-fiction film suggests that the marginal position that non-fiction film has historically held is no longer the case. As Renov (2004) argues, nonfiction or what Greirson coined documentary, has found new popularity, in no small part due to a sustained interest in reality TV (Renov, 2004) and the popularity of user-generated content on YouTube (Trinh Minh Ha, 2016). Documentary cinema, of course, has had its own share of debates around legitimacy and authority.Without falling into the rabbit hole of these debates, the takeaway for this chapter is that documentary opens up other avenues to think about the circulation of ethnographically rich content and offers up sites for ethnographic filmmakers to re-think their commitments and assumptions around filmmaking.Anthropologists and other social scientists who make nonfiction films can and should engage with these spaces to re-think what their commitments to subject and aesthetic might be. For social scientists choosing to submit films to documentary film festivals and investing in a very different history and community of practice, it becomes possible to potentially distance oneself from disciplinary and even sub-disciplinary centers.This has implications for one’s career trajectory. As a junior scholar I am all too aware of the ways in which blurring disciplinary boundaries can be fraught when it comes to tenure (in the United States) or promotion (in the United Kingdom).There has been a decades long push to attempt to legitimate film in the discipline as a scholarly output and, while this push has yielded ground, it is safe to say the legibility that comes from showing one’s film in an established ethnographic film festival and distributing one’s film with a recognized ethnographic film outfit goes a long way to legitimating it as an output. However, circulating the very same film in documentary spaces might not have the same, dare I say, significance or impact when it comes to tenure or promotion. Moreover, engaging with and producing work alongside documentary filmmakers who work with very different funding sources and streams and a different production ethos (e.g., a production crew versus the lone ethnographic filmmaker) opens up another set of economic and aesthetic challenges. Despite this, I think that these challenges are productive insofar as they help us reframe (to echo Basu, 2008) what we are doing as ethnographic filmmakers in the first place. Beyond the festivals, of course, are the distribution networks that bring experimental and documentary films to small, independent theaters in global cities like London. Engaging with these films, whether considered non-fiction, documentary, or experimental, potentially opens up a whole new way of thinking about ethnographic film. Take, for instance, anthropologist/ filmmaker Marrero-Guillamón’s (2018) reflections on Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s experimental films. Guillamón begins his article by describing his trip to Prince Charles Cinema in the West End and the sensate insights he gained from watching Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall Past Lives. He goes on to discuss how Apichatpong Weerasethakul films become a site to reimagine ethnographic film in ways that break from a simple copy aesthetic of realist representation toward a vitalism “where the world is not given in advance, but is rather a performative achievement, continuously (re)made” (2018, p. 17). Drawing on Apichatpong’s participatory and aesthetic methods, Guillamón pushes for a different sensibility around ethnographic filmmaking that goes beyond representation. Guillamón’s engagement with what ethnographic film could 296

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be vis-à-vis Apichatpong’s methods requires a willingness to engage beyond ethnographic film to reimagine it. Gulliamon’s (2018) openness to think beyond visual anthropological traditions to destabilize and reimagine ethnographic film is seemingly not common practice.A few years back, a group of graduate students (including myself) hosted a conference at the University of Pennsylvania titled “performing the digital” in an effort to bring together academics, media makers, and activists to think about what the digital turn offered us in terms of scholarly and political opportunities. Addressing the theme of our conference, Performing the Digital, Grimshaw argued for anthropology’s trailblazing legacy in producing audio-visual and multimodal work, contending that the “digital age” has not been as revolutionary a moment as contemporary scholars suggest. If anything, she argued, the rest of the academy could learn from anthropology’s 100-year-long experimentation with non-textual practices to engage social life. Grimshaw’s rhetorical moves to celebrate, even champion anthropology as always already multimodal, were helpful in an interdisciplinary setting insofar as they demonstrated anthropology’s contribution to legitimizing visual scholarship. Grimshaw, however, made these assertions while sitting next to Betty Yu. Yu is an artist and activist who sits outside of the disciplinary framework that Grimshaw had cast for the audience moments earlier. Yet, Yu’s filmic and installation work, which creatively depicts Chinese sweat shop labor and working-class displacement in twentieth-century New York, could be and should be considered ethnographic in its own right.2 Yu and others who may have been the subjects of past anthropological inquiry now produce and disseminate work that is ethnographic and anthropological through various channels of circulation.Yet, Grimshaw’s discussion of multimodality (and visuality) within a narrow, disciplinebound framework eclipsed the methodological and historical relevance of Yu’s contributions. It seemed clear, when listening to Yu, that historical change and technological innovation has radically changed who can make anthropologically relevant and theoretically provocative work and what relationships and correspondences these audio-visual projects can point toward.Yet, as was evident in Grimshaw’s response, the subdiscipline of visual anthropology has had a hard time opening itself up to these shifts and understanding itself differently through them. In part that has to do with the kinds of work the distribution networks that we have gotten used to— certainly the ethnographic film festivals we might submit our work to, as I have touched upon, but also the independent distributors that trade in ethnographic film collections legitimate as ethnographic. For instance, take Documentary Education Resources (DER), one of the primary distributors of ethnographic film with its mission to “support and distribute ethnographic film and media which promotes a cross-cultural understanding” (DER website, March, 2019). DERdistributed films are, in the tradition of twentieth- century visual anthropology, imagined as classroom teaching aides, or ways of engaging students around ethnological material (Vannini, 2015).As Martinez (1992) wryly notes, the sorts of films included in these distribution channels serve to teach undergraduate students about anthropology in accessible ways yet, often, serve to reify already preconceived notions of alterity. It does not help, of course, that the ethnographic films that are shown most often in anthropological departments for educational purposes are films that were produced in the 1960’s,1970’s, and 1980’s—for example, Robert Gardener’s Forest of Bliss (1986, DER), Napoleon Chagnon and Timothy Asch’s The Ax Fight (1975, DER). How would our understandings of ethnographic film change if we took Yu’s work and juxtaposed it against one of the more recent filmic additions to DER’s catalog, as I do in the visual anthropology courses I teach? How might we think differently about authority, aesthetics, and form? Even more daring, how might we reimagine ethnographic film if Yu’s audio-visual and installation work was cataloged and offered by DER as an example of ethnographic work? 297

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Of course,Yu’s installation and others like it travel in very different circuits than DER or ethnographic film festivals.They exist mainly in gallery spaces and on digital platforms and inhabit the category of conceptual/critical art. Anthropology has, in the last few years, begun a fruitful dialogue on how it might re-think its approaches and products and through engagements with the art world and beyond text (Cox, Irving, and Wright, 2016). Much of the work in this move to foreground the affinities between art and anthropology has focused on encounter, method, and relations (Sansi, 2015) rather than thinking through the political economies of circulation that underpin each world. How might an engagement with emergent and in-between genre forms in their circulations, tell us something important about ethnographic film in the twentyfirst century? What actors or configurations of actors emerge in these spaces that challenge the authorial taken-for-granted when discussing ethnographic film? How might these projects and products, if we gave them pride of place despite their departures from the formalistic parameters of film, reshape visual anthropology and ethnographic film?

Circulation: disrupting the category of ethnographic film The work I have chosen to engage with in this section to think through ethnographic film differently moves in alternate, although in some cases, parallel and intersecting circuits of distribution. My choices on what to engage with in this section are, admittedly, somewhat idiosyncratic and not meant to be representative of any specific trend. Rather, I chose each project as a way to illustrate the kinds of opportunities and tensions that emerge if we engage with circulation as a way to reimagine ethnographic film. I start with Karrabing collective and their body of work. Karrabing is a self-described cooperative based in Northern Australia who uses film to “analyze contemporary settler colonialism and, through these depictions, challenge its grip” (Lea and Povinelli, 2018, p. 37). Karrabing (an Emmiyengal word for “low tide turning”) produces its filmic output at its own pace and uses everyday digital tools to make their work (e.g., one of their films was shot in its entirety using smart phones).Their work draws from Boalian improvisational techniques and other theatrical staging traditions to fashion a method and mode of production that Lea and Povinelli (2018) call improvisational realism. Improvisational realism is a departure from reflexive realism (Loizos, 1992) insofar as it does not reproduce subject-author dichotomies but, rather takes up a participatory sensibility to storytelling. Importantly, for this discussion, the collective does not take up the usual paths of circulation to show their work (the film festival, the established distributor), instead opting for a more idiosyncratic set of sharing strategies. Short teasers of the films are on YouTube.3 The collective shows their films in their entirety when invited to galleries, universities, museums, and sometimes even conferences to screen them. In Lea and Povinelli’s (2018) discussion of the work of Karrabing collective, they point out that when the work is screened publicly there seems to be a need during talkbacks (in particular by anthropologists because of Povinelli’s involvement and the fact she is an anthropologist), to establish the genre of Karrabing’s work as ethnographic film. Moreover, they argue that anthropologists in the audience seem to have a vested interest in locating their filmic endeavors as a natural extension of Jean Rouch’s shared anthropological tradition. Lea and Povinelli (2018) argue that their work is less about genre and classification and more about “practice and formation: what practices bring forward a formation and social and land existence that Karrabing members struggle to (re)make as true” (p. 41). In this formulation it becomes clear that Karrabing locate their audio-visual work as political praxis. In so doing they challenge the notion that filmic circulation is always already a project meant to accrue economic or social value for a filmmaker or even a collective. 298

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Karrabing points us to YouTube and the gallery space as sites where important work that resists simple classification exists. They remind us that these works and their circulations are critical to help us think of ethnographic film otherwise.As Biddle and Lea (2018) point out, the emergence of “indigenous hyperreal art and new media taking shape at the forefront of settler and anti-colonial struggles, from neorealistic cinema and cultural sensorium to ficto-documentaries” not only pushes beyond tired paradigms in ethnographic film linked to the realism of ethnographic encounter or that represent the bounded cultural subject, but opens up new vistas of engagement and circulation. In stark contrast, Gill (2019) uses a documentary film project he worked on in the early 2000’s in the United States called Mission Movie to discuss how central value accrual and capital generation shapes how (documentary) filmmakers think about circulation. Gill (2019) describes Mission Movie as a community-based storytelling project that narrates processes of gentrification in the Mission District, San Francisco in the early 2000’s. He discusses how, despite winning several awards and being featured in film festivals across the United States, the film was not picked up precisely because of the multiple claims to ownership, rights, and authority that collaboration generated. Even though the principal filmmaker in the project decided to, on the advice of her lawyers, not provide participants with copies of the film on the advice of her lawyers on the grounds that dispersing ownership of the image would dilute its commodity value, distributors were wary to take up the project. Gill’s (2019) retrospective essay highlights how capitalist distribution networks, coupled with legal notions of authority and ownership, serve to control the circulation of documentary films that aspire to reach larger audiences. As importantly, Gill (2019) discusses how documentary filmmakers are at the mercy of these distribution chains as their livelihoods depend on them. Gill (2019) reflects on how, in his present incarnation as an academic anthropologist, there is little financial pressure to earn money from the films he produces.As Sikand (2015, p. 44) explains, most documentary filmmakers are not affiliated with an educational institution, such that they have to rely heavily on public funding and grants. By contrast, many anthropologists are attached to an educational institution. Consequently, their main source of income is not their filmic practice, allowing them more freedom in terms of whether their film is commercially viable or not. Gill’s (2019) and Sikand’s (2015) reflection on the distinct position of ethnographic filmmakers, who have the university as a source of stable income, becomes quite important in any discussion of ethnographic film, circulation, and academic work.While social scientist filmmakers are not producing and circulating films with the idea of economic recompense in mind, these artefacts are often produced to be shared in ways that accrue other forms of capital.The value that we seek to produce often is tied to our positions as scholars in the academy. In the US tenure and in the UK Research Excellence Framework (REF), pushes academics to think through how their various outputs will “count” as scholarly works.As Chio (2017) argues, the legibility and legitimacy of non-textual scholarship in anthropology relies on whether other anthropologists recognize the work you produce as part of the discipline. Chio (2017) points to how various new peer-reviewed multimodal platforms have emerged, in addition to existing ethnographic film festivals, that allow visual anthropologists to legitimate their works as scholarly but that there is still much work to do to structurally legitimate non-textual work in the discipline. Importantly, for this discussion at least, this need for a particular kind of circulation to foster disciplinary recognition no doubt pushes us to reify the category of ethnographic film as distinct. It also pushes us to keep sharing our work in particular venues and distributing our work with specific 299

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distributors to gain professional recognition. If we put Gill’s account of the Mission Movie and its failed circulation in conversation with Karrabing’s work and its alternate circulation, it becomes evident that aspirations for a particular form of circulation either tied to economic livelihoods, disciplinary recognition, as well as an indifference or even resistance to economic instrumentality, are central to how films are narrated, classified, and, more to the point of this essay, shared. Isuma.tv provides (yet) another example for us to think through questions of circulation. IsumaTV is “a collaborative multimedia platform for Indigenous filmmakers and media organizations. Each user can design their own space, or channel, to reflect their own identity, mandate and audience” (Isuma.tv). Foregoing any established distribution channel, isuma.tv shares its work freely and widely online.A broad array of publics can access some of Isuma TV’s content. To access the site in its entirety one has to become a member. Isuma’s work, with its focus on curating representations of everyday Indigenous life across the globe, can clearly be considered ethnographic. The goals of Isuma.tv, however, are not constructed within or around anthropological notions of “salvage” but, rather, contemporary Indigenous struggles for survivance (Simpson, 2018). Audio-visual production and circulation become the means for Indigenous communities to engage with one another and create contemporaneous figurations of indigenous lives.The implicit aesthetic and authorial strictures of ethnographic film are abandoned in favor of a multiplicity of approaches and engagements—all relying on readily available technology.

Conclusion An engagement with Isuma.tv, Karrabing, and even Gill’s (2019) reflections on the Mission Movie push for a reconceptualization of what constitutes the category of ethnographic film in the first place even as it pushes us to scrutinize the networks of circulation we take for granted.There are, of course, other examples we could draw from to push beyond a narrow definition of ethnographic film and toward a broader engagement with ethnographically engaged media.We could engage, for instance, with conceptual video art more closely, looking at the various ways artists and social scientists utilize multi-channel installation work in ways which are ethnographic (Campbell, 2011).As importantly for this chapter, we can think about whether, how, and where these practices might, if put into an active conversation with normative academic knowledge production, circulate. Indeed, a focus on circulation pushes us to re-think not only what can be included in the category of ethnographic film but who can be included and, ultimately, what the ongoing value and political economy of the category holds in the contemporary moment.

Notes 1 https://raifilm.org.uk/programme-2019/ 2 See http://www.bettyyu.net/displacedinsunsetpark for examples of Yu’s work. 3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOnDyRSc3r8

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Circulating ethnographic films today Campbell, C. (2011).Terminus: Ethnographic Terminalia. Visual Anthropology Review 27(1) 52-56. Chio, J. (2017). “Guiding lines.” Member voices. Fieldsights, May 2. Retrieved from https://culanth.org/ fieldsights/guiding-lines Cox, R., Irving, A., & Wright, C. (2016). Introduction:The sense of the senses. In R. Cox, A. Irving, & C. Wright (Eds.), Beyond text?: Critical practices and sensory anthropology (pp. 1–19). Manchester: Manchester University Press. Crawford, P., & Turton, D. (1992). Film as Ethnography. Manchester: University of Manchester Press. Gill, H. (2019). De-gentrifying documentary & ethnographic cinemas: Displacement of community-based storytelling in San Francisco’s Mission District. Pluralities. Retrieved from https://www.pluralities. org/01/06 Ginsburg, F. (1995). Parallax effect:The impact of aboriginal media on ethnographic film. Visual Anthropology Review, 11(2), 64–76. Hastrup, K. (1992).Anthropological visions: Some notes on visual and textual authority. In I. Peter Crawford & D.Turton (Eds.), Film as ethnography (pp. 8–25). Manchester: Manchester University Press. Heider, K. (2006). Ethnographic film.Austin,TX: University of Texas Press. Lea,T., & Povinelli, E. (2018). Karrabing:An essay in keywords. Visual Anthropology Review, 34(1), 36–46. Loizos, P. (1992). Admissible evidence? Film in anthropology. In P. I. Crawford & D.Turton (Eds.), Film as ethnography (pp. 50–65). Manchester: Manchester University Press. MacDougall, D. (2000). Transcultural cinema. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UniversityPress. Marrero-Guillamón, I. (2018). The politics and aesthetics of non-representation: Re-imagining ethnographic cinema with Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Antípoda: Revista De Antropología Y Arqueología, 33(33), 13–32. Martinez, W. (1992). Who constructs anthropological knowledge?: Towards a theory of ethnographic film spectatorship. In P. Crawford & D. Turton (Eds.), Film as ethnography. Machester and New York: Manchester University Press. Minh-Ha,T. (2016).The image and the void. Journal of Visual Culture, 15(1), 131–140. Pink, S. (2006). The future of visual anthropology: Engaging the senses. London: Routledge. Pink, S. (2009). Oak park stories by Jay Ruby. American Anthropologist, 111(1), 105–108. Renov, M. (2004). The subject of documentary (visible evidence; vol. 16). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Rouch, J. (2003). Ciné-Ethnography. Steven Feld, Editor. Mineapolis, University of Minnesota Press. Ruby, J. (1975). Is an ethnographic film a filmic ethnography? 2(2), 104–111. Retrieved from https://re pository.upenn.edu/svc/vol2/iss2/6 Ruby, J. (1975). Is an ethnographic film a filmic ethnography? Studies in Visual Communication Ruby, J. (1991). Speaking for, speaking about, speaking with, or speaking alongside – An anthropological and documentary dilemma. Visual Anthropology Review, 7(2), 50–67. Ruby, J. (2000). Picturing culture. Explorations of film and anthropology. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Ruby, J. (2007). Digital oak park:An experiment. Critical Arts: South-North Cultural and Media Studies, 21(2), 321–332. Sansi, R. (2015). Art, anthropology and the gift. London: Bloomsbury. Santos, D. (2017). Reflections on an ethnographic film festival. Anthropology News, 58(5-6). Sikand, N. (2015). Filmed ethnography or ethnographic film?:Voice and positionality in ethnographic, documentary, and feminist film. Journal of Film and Video, 67(3), 42–56. Champaign: University of Illinois Press. Simpson,A. (2018).“Tell me why, why, why”:A critical commentary on the visuality of settler expectation. Visual Anthropology Review, 34(1), 60–66. Suhr, C., & Willerslev, C. (2012). Can film show the invisible? The work of montage in ethnographic filmmaking. Current Anthropology, 53(3).282–301. Vannini, P. (2015). Ethnographic film and video on hybrid television: Learning from the content, style and distribution of popular ethnographic documentaries. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 44(4), 391–416. Vidali, D. (2016). Multisensorial anthropology:A retrofit cracking open of the field. American Anthropologist, 118(2), 395–400. Weinberger, E. (1992).The camera people. Transition, 55, 24–54.

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28 ETHNOGRAPHIC FILM/VIDEO AS A GRADUATE THESIS Catherine Gough-Brady

Most of the ethnographic film projects discussed in either this handbook or the rest of the scholarly literature are the result of scholarly work by professional academics with access (albeit variable) to time, equipment, funding, and assistants. In some cases, these scholars can also benefit from the job security afforded by tenure. But what happens when an ethnographic film project is undertaken by a graduate student as part of their MA or scholarly work? Do differing resources impact the quality or ambition of the work? Do doctoral committees shape the nature of the output? In this chapter I discuss the use of ethnographic film and video as the main “deliverable” of a graduate project. Like a video, a PhD thesis or dissertation is often a collaborative project involving a team of people.The team members bring their skills to the project, whether that is knowledge of theoretical frameworks, academic institutional knowledge, intellectual rigor, or peer support.The team consist of the supervisors, but also other candidates working with video. At times, for example, universities allow students to rely on the help of additional team members (like editors, additional camera operators, etc.) whereas in other cases students are expected to carry the entire load themselves. Given the many differing natures of using video in the graduate research process across departments, universities, and countries around the world, I asked Sarah Abbott, a PhD candidate from Canada, and Sarah Franzen, who has recently completed her PhD in the United States, to contribute their experiences to this chapter. I have also drawn on experiences of Mariko Smith, Ana Beltrán, and Andrea Rassell. Our experiences provide different perspectives, from different countries, on how we have used video in our PhDs. I hope these experiences will provide my readers with a variety of perspectives on how to tackle their theses and dissertations through media that transcend the typical written formats.Along the way I offer bits of advice which I hope some of you might find valuable.

Selecting the right program and supervisor I shall start with my story. In Australia, not all institutions offer creative practice PhDs, and whether you can undertake a PhD for which your video is part of the word count depends upon the institution. In other words, it is not something generally decided at committee level. In my case, as an applicant this narrowed my choice down to a few institutions that encourage project-based PhDs. Because I was an outsider to academia I was searching for an academic supervisor who had also been a practitioner in the industry, and while I might have different cri302

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teria now, and I am more engaged with those working in theorizing practice, it ended up being an excellent starting point. Being a practitioner academic meant they understood the value of video as a means of recording, analyzing, and communicating new knowledge. I began interviewing potential lead supervisors, and I kept interviewing them until I narrowed it down to two supervisors: Craig Batty at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University (RMIT) and Steve Thomas at University of Melbourne (at the time known as Victorian College of the Arts [VCA]). Both of these supervisors had practice experience, and both were interested in supporting me creating films as part of my PhD. Steve Thomas is an award-winning documentary filmmaker that I respect, we “get along,” and VCA is my alma mater, so this seemed like the obvious choice. But, Steve did not yet have his own PhD. The person who would have to step in as the senior supervisor was someone who I did not “get along with.”This might seem petty, but I find people are like shoes, if they don’t feel right when you first try them on, regret follows.This was a three-year relationship I was entering, I needed to feel a connection with, and feel respected by, the supervisor. Craig Batty was, on the surface, an unusual choice because he worked in fiction scriptwriting. In my PhD I have been exploring how documentarians turn the people we video into documentary characters. I approached Batty because scriptwriters think about character. I correctly thought he could bring his script-writing knowledge of character to the table.At our first meeting he asked me to talk about what I might do in my PhD and as I did this he drew a diagram of how my PhD would look. I realized he thought visually. I was intrigued by how he was facilitating and guiding what I wanted to do, rather than telling me what I should do. I could see that he understood that I wanted to create a series of experiments where I examined, through video, aspects of the documentary character. It bode well for us being able to work together. The candidature proposal I created followed the format the university required: it was entirely in text, and I made it clear that video would form part of the word count of my PhD. I even said that I would submit the PhD as a website using text and audio-visual elements.A section of the document was explicitly about how the text and video elements would interact with each other in the PhD. Another section focused on video being an important part of the process of the research.The video in this document is called the “project,” to quote from the document: Part of the significance of the project will be the process of creation, not just the outcome.The process will feed into reflexive aspects of the dissertation.The dissertation and the project will both critically examine the notion of the documentary character. For me, and for other colleagues, video is not something tacked on to the project, it is integral to the research design. In sum, my advice with regard to these issues is to be strategic: select a university and/or department that explicitly allows—or better yet encourages—the use of non-written theses or dissertations and recruit a supervisor who is committed to, and has experience in, the medium you want to use for your research. Sarah Franzen completed her PhD at Emory University, located in Atlanta, United States. Her research integrated visual anthropology, race, and socio-economic development in order to examine community-based rural development, alternative agriculture, and social change. She used video to explore the intersections between public scholarship and socially engaged art. Franzen had a different experience, she had to convince the university to allow her to include video: I entered into my graduate program based on the assumption that I would be using video as part of my PhD research. During my course work within the program, I took 303

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courses on ethnographic filmmaking and visual anthropology. I also created films based on preliminary research, which I screened for my department and at larger graduate school presentations. Therefore, by the time I was defending my prospectus in order to enter into candidacy, I had demonstrated how I would be incorporating video into my dissertation research both through course work and by creating preliminary films. During my prospectus defense, which included the submission of a written research proposal and a public oral defense, I presented my use of video through sharing video clips gathered during my preliminary research. Franzen not only trained herself, she realized she needed to work at an institutional level to convince the university. She was part of a team of people that helped make this happen: I was not the only student at my university using video or some other non-textual material within my dissertation.As a group, we worked together to counter dissent and defend the academic use of video and other visual, audio, and performative materials within PhD research. One key way we made our case was, as previously mentioned, through screenings and presentations of our materials with specific invitations to faculty that may not be familiar or supportive of video as a research tool.We also invited our dean to these screenings and presentations. This established a basis for when we petitioned the graduate school to allow our non-textual material to be included as part of our dissertation submission. While individually we each had to convince our own departments, by convincing the dean we created institutional support. Once one graduate student was allowed to submit video as part of their PhD, the path was formed and each subsequent student had an easier time convincing their departments and the university.Although I was challenged by some faculty individually, by the time I was in the process of submitting my dissertation, I had a relatively easy time submitting video as a critical part of my research.This ease was really based on all the previous work I had done individually to promote my use of video, and the work we had done collectively as a group to demonstrate to the departments and the graduate school the importance of non-textual research. As more universities support this type of work, future students will increasingly find it easier to overcome barriers based on presumptions. My hope is that this will turn the discussion to theoretical and epistemological implications of the particular non-textual practice, rather than resistance to innovate or creative approaches to research and academic expression. A collaborative culture creates the space in which we can share experiences of using video in the PhD with other students who are also grappling with the same problems. Just as Franzen found peer culture important, I too found this valuable. Part of the reason that I chose RMIT as an institution for my own PhD was because it has a strong collaborative peer culture: the other students become a part of my team, and I a part of theirs. Indeed, this is my second bit of advice: try not to be alone. Find fellow students whose support you can rely on; their presence will always make a difference in the very culture of your institution.

The dreaded ethics clearance Filming people as they are being interviewed complicates university ethics. Most universities have an ethics policy based upon issues encountered in science experiments, and this can sit awkwardly with the methodologies of other disciplines. By looking at previous applications, I 304

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could see that the ethics committee members had absolutely no knowledge about filmmaking. The lack of knowledge was so dire that even common terms, such as saying “to photograph” to mean “to video,” were confusing to committee members. I am not alone, of course. Many institutional review boards around the world make explicit and inflexible demands about research participants’ anonymity.Yet these demands are often driven by a lack of understanding of methods that can be used to ensure ethical dealings with filmed subjects. For my research I planned to interview a series of documentary filmmakers, and so in the ethics application I made it explicit why I needed to video, as opposed to using existing interview material, or another form of capturing the interview.To quote from my document: It is important for this study to be able to have direct access to primary source video of the documentary directors.There are three key reason why: 1. the subject matter of this study tends not to be the primary focus of existing interviews with documentarians, 2. the research will be used as part of documentary-style outputs, and so needs to be recorded on video, 3. any existing video recordings with documentarians tend to be owned by broadcasters and are prohibitively expensive for me to license to use the material. As well as the practical reasoning above, I outlined my methodology in plain language, even using dot points. Each dot point related to a single theorist. Each theorist provided a reason why I needed to use video. My first point explored working both inside and outside the experience, and that both experiential and analytical knowledges needed to be at play in my work. Filming, for me, is the “inside” experience. My second point outlined how meaning can be created from the relationship between the intertextual parts, namely video and text. My last point explained that I needed to use my medium, audio-visual, as my method of communication for the research. This is because the qualities of the audio-visual medium encourage a different form of knowledge transfer (this alone is one of the most forceful arguments you can make). Essentially, I created a solid methodological argument that was backed up by wellrespected sources in my own field. Which brings me to my advice: be firm and clear in your argument about why you are using video.There are many research projects around the world that already use video, it can be done.You are arguing from a position where you should be allowed to use video. Sarah Abbott is an associate professor in the Film Department at the University of Regina, in Canada. She is also an established professional filmmaker who happens to be currently—at writing time—pursuing her doctoral degree at Royal Roads University, in Canada. Her research focuses on tree communication. In her dissertation proposal she used different theorists to underpin her argument, but used some of the same points I did to justify why she needed to film. Here is an extract from her ethics application: Taking an ontological point of departure, the video produced through my dissertation research will relay a sense of immanence, inspiration, and connection that moves people to deeper awareness of [my research topic,] trees’ agentic realities, and human and nonhuman reciprocal relationships.Video and video in research enables an intuitive, conversational mode to collect research data; it brings people, cultures—trees and other nonhumans—alive in ways that words and photographs cannot because successive video frames evoke the sensation of living presence—'being there’—through the illusion of movement over time (Barbash and Taylor, 1997).This draws people into the 305

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sensual and experiential, stories, histories, issues and circumstances, by activating their imaginations, senses, emotions, understanding, and empathy. The experiential nature of video allows for a different type of knowledge transfer. Elements that are implicit in text, for instance body-language, spatial relationships, or visuals, can be explicit in audio-visual media. The words said, that most easily translate into text, are just part of the meaning being conveyed. As well as the methodology and logistics, ethics documents are concerned with risk. I offered my participants the right to view and request changes to any use of their voice/image. I also offered them the opportunity to withdraw, but Abbott took this a step further and allowed anonymity, which is not something I offered: On the consent form, I discuss the use of film in my research, and include options for participants to remain anonymous. I let participants know they will be given the opportunity to see and offer feedback on the nearly-final drafts of the film and two associated papers (on methodologies and outcomes) that comprise my doctorate portfolio; and that they are free to withdraw their participation, without prejudice, at any time until six weeks prior to submission of the fine cut of my film to my doctoral committee in preparation for my defense. I also included a release form as a separate document specific to the film, in anticipation of distribution. It is interesting to note that no one that Abbott filmed asked to be anonymized. Sarah Franzen did not offer anonymity for her subjects, and as a result her work was granted an exemption. Like me, Franzen found the required consent forms unwieldy and the ethics system not well adapted to filming: The submission process to the Institutional Review Board (IRB) is structured on certain assumptions about research that were immediately violated by my use of video. Since I would be filming my research participants, I could not guarantee anonymity. The very process of filming within my research was meant to reveal and expose personal stories, rather than protect the identity and source of these stories. In the end, the IRB deemed my research exempt, because the use of video as a collection of individualized stories could not be generalized, and therefore without being generalizable was not true research. My research project was placed in a category similar to those collecting oral histories. However, the IRB did require a specific consent form be used; one that included very precise language.Although the dense formal language more thoroughly covered a range of concerns, it was unintelligible to many of my participants, and therefore counterproductive to the goals of informed consent. I always included a filmed verbal explanation and consent of the project along with the written consent form to correct for the opaqueness of the form. My advice in relation to ethics and informed consent is to generate options. Give your research participants the option to review their material (early cuts, transcripts, etc.) prior to publication. It’s scary to do, but give the people who feature in the video the option to withdraw entirely before lock-off. The video works we create try to generate understanding about an aspect of life, not vilify it, so consent will rarely be withdrawn at this stage. By giving these powers to the subjects being filmed you will give your Institutional Review Board the reassurance that your research participants will not be harmed by participating in your research. 306

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Being creative about the lack of funds In most countries there is no “video funding” available for PhD films. But also, in most cases the type of work being created within a PhD is not suited to the existing funding models, which are geared toward broadcaster pre-sales. I started a PhD because I was bored with making broadcast documentaries and wanted to use the space to experiment. I would see it as a pity to use the space of a PhD to just focus on making a broadcaster-style project. I see the scholarship payment I receive as a funding plan that buys my time. I’m not the first documentarian to use the PhD as a way of creating videos that do not have clear market path inside the industry. For the videos I am creating as part of the PhD I choose projects where I have easy access to locations and/or people.When I filmed the award-winning Expect Delays (2018), the shoot location was so close to my home I walked to it, with my gear.The social systems and stories that a candidate wants to film are probably found in the local neighborhood, as well as in some tropical exotic country. Having no budget leads to creative thinking about the essence of what it is you are filming, and how you can access that without airfares, large crews, tons of gear, etc. Because video is a collaborative endeavor, I collaborate with other students to create works. I knew I wanted a sound design for Expect Delays, and that I did not have the skillset to be able to create something of sufficient quality myself, but I also did not have a budget. So, I made contact with the sound department at my university and they connected me with two third-year students. Creating the soundtrack for Expect Delays became part of their final year coursework. One of them has left university and the other is undertaking honors.We enjoyed working with each other and have collaborated again on the sound design for another short experimental video River Crisis (2019). As well as developing new creative relationships with students, I skill swap favors with PhD students. I video for them, they video for me.We don’t pay each other for any work we do for each other on PhD projects, it is part of the skill sharing. Finally, I am part of a reading/critic group called “rough titties” (a joke on our primarily female membership and a slang term which means tough luck). In this group we look at each other’s work and give tough feedback on rough and fine cuts.This group is extremely important and we all use each other to test edits of our works. I can become so close that I can’t really see the video, there is something about watching a video with an audience that immediately makes clear, to me, how the edit is functioning. It is as if I can feel the audience reaction.We also collaborate on exhibition ideas.Three of us from this group organized screenings of our works on a large outdoor screen in the center of Melbourne. Sarah Franzen also told me about the importance of peer-learning processes in her PhD candidature: I was not alone in actively promoting the use of video as part of the PhD. Several graduate students joined together to form the Visual Scholarship Initiative, which included students from different departments, all of whom were using non-textual components in their PhD dissertations. We held regular panels, exhibitions, screenings, and workshops to promote and demonstrate the academic use of non-textual materials.Those of us specifically using video had also set up several screenings of our work during which specialists on the topic we were portraying were invited as commentators.These screenings created a space of dialogue in which the non-filmic specialist was asked to consider what was learned on the topic at hand through the medium of video.These screenings proved extremely valuable in developing awareness among faculty from several different departments as to the academic rigor involved in our video work. It created a space in which the academic value was the key element discussed, and often 307

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the non-filmic specialists, and other audience members, were surprised by how valuable the filmed material was in elucidating concepts often difficult to communicate textually.These activities primed the way for my individual prospectus defense. There are often small internal university grants—ranging from $1,000 to $2,000—designed to assist travel and research. I have so far received two grants to help pay for travel. I combine attending conferences with recording overseas interviews. Not only does this save me time and money, it makes my grant application stronger because I am both recording material I need for my PhD and engaging with other scholars at a conference. Having said that, there are cases where a shoot is going to be a long way from home, and not on route to a conference. I am actively trying to include diversity in my work because I find there is a tendency toward the “male, pale and stale” in the documentarians being discussed in academia. As a result, I chose to interview an award-winning female Pakistani director, Sabiha Sumar. It would have been too difficult for me to record this interview in person, I looked into it and the visa restrictions were problematic. The solution was to use a local award-winning documentary DOP experienced in the style of filming I wanted, Haider Ali. He filmed the interview and other shots I needed. I skyped in to ask the questions.The cost of hiring him was not cheap, but it was significantly cheaper and easier than heading to Pakistan myself. Most universities have equipment you can borrow. I have my own professional camera, sound gear, and lights. But I have borrowed extra lights and a second camera from RMIT on occasion. Also, I have borrowed equipment from other students.While I don’t lend my equipment out, I will volunteer to use it myself on other student’s shoots. So, there is a collective notion of the equipment available within the cohort of PhD students. I don’t always use my professional equipment. On a recent overseas trip, I was planning to record a single interview. Rather than take my gear, which is heavy, I took a mobile phone, with a light tripod, a mobile clamp, and a zoom H4n recorder with lapel mic. For the digital papers I create, this is sufficient for the recording quality. With mobile phones the image is okay for a head shot, what I don’t like about using a mobile to shoot is the audio quality which is too “roomy,” hence the separate audio set up. I think people can become obsessed with the equipment, when in fact the most important thing is the content, and the filmmaker’s ability to weave that content into an engaging narrative. In sum, my advice is to be creative. Don’t let limited funds discourage you from pursuing a project that you will be passionate about.The most powerful stories can be inexpensive to find and share. Along the way, make new friends: your peers will be of great help to you—and you can help them in return—in ways that are unimaginable at first.

Why use video? No one will ever ask you why you choose writing as a mode to share your research. But the minute you choose to do video, you will be immediately asked to defend your choice. In my experience the best answer is that video has the potential to engage with a wider audience than a text-based PhD, and thus it can have greater impact on the target audience. But to achieve that it requires strategic thinking about the audience for which you are making the video. In the examples below the candidates all selected quite specific primary target audiences for their videos or images. Ana Beltrán is a biologist who has shifted departments to Media and Communication so that she can use video in her research. She is undertaking her PhD at RMIT in Australia. Beltrán is collaborating with a group of Colombian women on a series of videos. These women are 308

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traditional knowledge holders on plants. She aims “to create a participative anthropological documentary video.” She is “using visual ethnography and a pair of cinema workshops in order to bring polyphony, their creations, and mine, from a critical and reflective postcolonial, post human and ecofeminist perspective.”The video becomes a part of Beltrán’s research process as well as the means of recording data. It becomes an effective way of giving the research back to the community. Another colleague of mine, Mariko Smith, is a Yuin Nation woman, academic, and museum curator. In her PhD she explored how Indigenous communities of south-eastern coastal Australia engage with the process of making a tied-bark canoe “particularly following a break in tradition.” She used photo elicitation as an interview technique, creating albums of images. She argues that using images as part of her methodology “is compatible with Indigenous ways of knowing that strongly privilege the senses and collaborative learning.” For Smith, the use of imagery was integral to the type of knowledge transfer she was researching. She also used these images in a museum display accompanying the canoe that had been made.The images revealed the process of creation to the visitors, and so images became integral to reaching a wider audience, as well as knowledge transfer within the target audience. In both of these cases these candidates have used imagery as a way of directly connecting with their target audience, the people they are collaborating with on the research. Images became part of their process of research as well as end results that can speak to the target audience. Focusing on a target audience does not exclude the option of re-cutting material for a wider audience. But in my experience, identifying a specific audience makes it easier, logistically, and in terms of storytelling styles and format, for the videos to be able to reach into that audience and have impact. However, there are cases where the intention is to transfer knowledge from a small group to a larger audience. A colleague of mine, Andrea Rassell, works at the intersection of nanotechnology and video. She says that she works “in spaces that have highly restricted access, so using video is a way of bringing others into that space and, in some small sense, democratizing spaces of science that are funded by the taxes of, but not accessible to, the general public.” For Rassell video has the ability to share knowledge that usually only a few scientists can access. Part of what Rassell does is construct ways that allow us to visualize nano-things that we cannot see using our biological eyes. Not only is she allowing us to see what is usually hidden in labs, she is working on how that nano-scale is represented in imagery. In these three examples the identification of the target audience informs the methodology and epistemology that underpins the use of video. In my own PhD, I use video in three different ways, to 1. Record. 2. Embody the research and answer research questions. 3. Communicate the explication and theory.

Recording As part of my PhD I have conducted a series of interviews with documentary practitioners.The main reason that my “data” need to be recorded on video is because from the outset I planned to create video works using the material.Video is my main form of communication.What that means is that the filmed interviews stop being mere “data,” and become “footage” awaiting transformation into an edited form.The video is not the end point that awaits analysis. Instead, the “footage” is something about to undergo a process of transformation. For me, footage is a 309

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stop along the journey of film-making, not the terminus. It is the material with which I can create, not the creation. I need to record because without the recording I have nothing to work with, nothing to help me create meaning.

Embodying The second way I have used video is to create films that help me answer research questions. For instance, I created a short video Expect Delays (2018) because I wanted to explore John Grierson’s idea of the co-operative character. I decided to make a contemporary video using co-operative characters to see what this video would be like. Before I started, I felt Grierson’s ideas were outdated and that we now create works using heroic characters. But by making the video I came to realize that co-operative characters appear in modern works in a different format, not necessarily as observed characters, but as talking head characters. I also understood more about how characters drive my editing process.Without central characters there was no one claiming and warping narrative time around them, instead the narrative used a simple cause and effect form.These realizations are not made clear in the video itself, instead I created a digital paper, and a written chapter to explain these discoveries.The experimental films are central to my research process because it is by creating them that I answer the research question posed.

Explication The third way I use video is in digital papers.They are a form of essay film that includes theory and explication.They emerged out of my industry methodology. I have spent my life behind the camera and the “live” and ephemeral nature of conference presenting did not make sense to me. So, I created a video for my first academic presentation. I then discovered that I could publish these as digital papers in peer-review journals that accept video works.The conference presentation origin of these films means that I have used the essay style to mimic the author voice found in presentation sessions. But explication can occur in other ways, for instance I need not be so present in the work, experts in the field could be interviewed and comment on the matter.The essay video is the mode I have chosen because it works in both the presentation and publication phases of the life of the video. What is exciting about these different forms of video is that they interact with each other. Experiments arise out of seeing theory against the footage in the digital paper.Then the process of creating the experimental video poses interesting challenges for the next digital paper. For instance, River Crisis (2019) grew out of seeing the theory against an image in a digital paper, I became aware of the water in the shot and wondered if I could make a non-sentient being, such as water, a central character. River Crisis (2019) excludes people and uses just the river system. Now that I have made that experimental video I wonder if I can make a digital paper that does not use words for the theoretical discussion. It may not be possible, but I am intrigued by the idea of trying to explore a post-humanist form of knowledge transfer. In the process of creating these films, I am exploring how they can be used as a method of communication. Because academic films are undergoing rapid growth, it is an exciting time where the borders of what is possible are being explored. Because of this I have found that I receive two different reactions to my digital papers at conferences. Some people are very interested in the form, and how it can be used, and then a smaller group of people who are exploring similar areas of practice to me, are interested in the content of what it is saying. It speaks on both a medium and message level. 310

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So, in sum, whenever you are asked why you want to create videos instead of writing, don’t look for justifications. Don’t go on the defensive. Often people who are skeptical toward or outright against the use of video instead of writing have never thought enough about the limitations of the conventional mode.Video, you should remind them, transcends those obvious limitations by reaching an audience in a way that a 100,000-word thesis written in dense academic language can never compete with.

What will the thesis look like? I haven’t yet determined how the parts of my thesis will fit together and be delivered to an examiner. Sarah Abbott and Sarah Franzen have and this is what they told me. Sarah Abbott wrote about the flexibility of video, and various possibilities of how the material can be used, but also the restrictions of what can be delivered in the defence: It took 9.5 months to organize the approximately 125 hours of video and audio material I collected during fieldwork of direct interviews, walking interviews, a workshop, and supplementary imagery and sound. I have enough footage to make a web or broadcast series.The challenge now is to focus the material for a video of 90 minutes, the maximum agreed upon timeframe for the dissertation. I may incorporate a few quotes from the literature, represented as text, in my video to guide its flow and structure. Later, after completion of the doctorate, I may create a series. I look forward to creating a web presence of my research that incorporates some of the video material. Like Abbott there are parts of the video that I will definitely include in the PhD, but other parts I am not yet sure if they will exist outside the PhD or within it. Partly this is to do with limiting the number of minutes that I force the examiner to watch, but partly it is the amount of time available inside the PhD to cut more material. Sarah Franzen has completed her PhD and has explored exactly how the video and text parts fit together: My final PhD product was shaped in a large part by the mechanics of electronic submission and storing of dissertations within the University. From a design standpoint, I wanted the text and films to interact, each demonstrating different aspects of the topic or theoretical claim I was making within the dissertation. I initially conceived of formatting this through InDesign in order to produce an interactive PDF which would hold both the films and the text. However, I was including 23 video vignettes within my dissertation, and that amount of media had to be separately uploaded and stored within the university system. Furthermore, uploading the actual films into the university system had copyright implications. I chose, in the end, to use links to the films which were stored on a third party server. In order to create the sense of integration I desired, I inserted still images from the video into the text at the point I wanted the video to be viewed.The still image was hyperlinked to the video’s url (and the url was textually included in the caption). My intention was that the reader would at this point turn to the video, and then return to the reading. Even if the reader chose to watch and read the material in a different order, they could still see and understand my intended integration of the text and films. 311

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These are just some of the many available options, of course. Some universities will require some writing—perhaps one chapter or two—in addition to a lengthy film. Other universities will allow for a sort of “discount” on the written expectations for a thesis, counting a film as a chapter or two.The reality is that most universities and most social scientific departments or thesis committees have never given any sufficient thought to how much time it takes to film and edit a video. My advice is to work with your committees by outlining to them in clear detail all the various steps of filming, from pre-production to post-production. No doctoral committees are populated by sadists. Once committee members understand the complexity and time-consuming dimensions of video ethnographic work you will, hopefully, be allowed to get some sleep at night.

Conclusion It is important when embarking on a PhD using video as the medium for your thesis or dissertation to choose the right supervisory team who support using video as a means of research. That team will extend out from the supervisors to colleagues in your PhD cohort. Working together you can help each other create better video works, and help the university understand how video can be used in research. It is important that video is not tacked on to the end of your methodology merely to generate impact. It should be integrated into your research design, become a part of how you find meaning, and how you communicate and interact with who and what you are studying. Funds are limited for PhD video, which encourages being creative about forming alliances with other students and using the existing resources. People who are new to video often place too much value on the technology being used and forget the importance of the content being gathered.After all, a documentary partly shot on a mobile phone has won an Academy Award. In the end the thesis needs to be read / watched by the examiners, and while there are stories of PhDs that have been entirely delivered on video, the likely scenario will be a document that includes a combination of text and video.You should be open to these “compromises” and understand that publishing one or two of your chapters as a journal article—perhaps about the methodology of your film—will only increase your chances of finding work after your thesis is complete, and will also establish your credibility as a practitioner-scholar. There may be days when having to convince department chairs, deans, or thesis committees of everything you wish to do will take an emotional toll on you. On those days, you should remind yourself you are not alone. Every decade has witnessed challenges from forward-thinking students of all kinds, whether those challenges were to the experimental method, to the dominant theory of the day, or to the anonymity of research participants. Universities are open to change, but they do require changemakers as much as any institution does.

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29 ETHNOGRAPHIC FILM FESTIVALS Carlo Cubero

This chapter examines the role that the film festival format plays in informing the terms of ethnographic cinema.1 I examine this question in a context where the theoretical interests and technological conditions in which ethnographic cinema is produced are shifting both within and outside of anthropology. These theoretical shifts are related to the broadening of visual anthropology’s network to include fields such as the anthropology of the senses, practice-based research, and the relationship between visual anthropology and the exhibition and culture industry.These theoretical developments occur in tandem with the digitization of the production and distribution process, a process which has facilitated production rates, contributed to an increase in thematic film festivals, and eased the process of distribution of content across disciplinary lines. This expansion of the film festival industry has facilitated a space for ethnographic film festivals to articulate a self-reflexive event that attracts audiences and filmmakers from within and outside of anthropology, thus blurring lines around the notion of traditional ethnographic film and anthropological cinema. In this chapter I will revisit the role of the ethnographic film festival in this expanding and shifting context and offer some indications as to how curators and ethnographic filmmakers navigate these shifts productively. Throughout the chapter I will argue that while the importance of the film festival format has not diminished within the visual anthropology community, its potential for development lies in articulating a trans-disciplinary project for audio-visual ethnography and in creating a space to research the possibilities of different media to convey a sense of an intersubjective experience. I will show how curators of anthropological film festivals have maintained a sense of continuity in their events by producing programs that are self-reflexive, generative, and networked across disciplinary lines. The figure of the curator plays a central role in this story. In the context of the anthropological film festival, the curator does not function as a manager or arbiter of anthropological content. This position would not be tenable because there is no categorical definition for “anthropological cinema” which the curator can rely on to archive and display content. In fact, contemporary curators contend with an increasing number of submissions that do not correspond with the expectations of classic anthropological cinema (Ruby, 2000). Curators also engage with an increasing interest from an audience that is not directly related to academic anthropology. The curator produces an event by carefully selecting content from a variety of sources and contextualizes them into a coherent event. The curator’s contextualizing tools are the choice 313

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of venue, the format of the screenings, order of the day, social events, messaging, promotion, etc. Anthropological film festival curators also examine revisions to the film festival format when other formats such as exhibitions, sound works, interactive events, performances, and trade events are included in their program.The result is an event that resembles less an academic conference and is more akin to a carnival, a multimedia production, and an experience-based event that features a variety of content in different formats. This approach recalls Mark Cousins’ understanding of a film program as analogous to a story authored by the curator, its narrative embedded within the order of the films selected (Cousins, 2013). From this perspective, the anthropological film festival is akin to an ethnographic event, a happening, a story drawn from materials that were submitted to the curating team, rather than a survey of the latest methodological developments in anthropological cinema. In this approach, anthropology, its history, and anthropological cinema are not objects to be displayed. Rather, “anthropology,” with its practices and theories, serves more as a reference point from where curators can draw inspiration for their curating practices. I propose that these circumstances represent a positive development for the field and contribute to an understanding of anthropological cinema as a practice-based approach, rather than a theoretically delineated genre within documentary cinema or as a methodology contextualized within text-based anthropological theory. This context plays out in a terrain where niche programs and thematic festivals, such as anthropological film festivals, dominate the circuit. The abundance and variety of programs, combined with the technical ease of submitting films, offers film-makers the opportunity to showcase their work in a wide variety of contexts and network across disciplinary fields. This situation also liberates curators from genre constraints and empowers them to pursue trans-disciplinary research questions with their programs.These programs are produced independently, and curators often manage their event in precarious financial situations, dependent on multiple and inconsistent funding bodies, an increasingly competitive field, and relying on volunteers and favors.These circumstances cast the curator as (1) a cultural entrepreneur who manages different interests and stakeholders in producing a sustainable event, and (2) as a researcher whose event is the articulation of a trans-disciplinary inquiry. In what follows, I will attempt to offer a historical perspective on some of the complex characteristics of the anthropological film festival, its role in the development of anthropological cinema, and its relationship to academia.The chapter is informed by anthropological film programs that I have curated in collaboration with filmmakers, anthropologists, and cinema managers in Europe and the Caribbean. It is also informed by my reading of certain trends in the development of anthropological film festivals in Europe and film festival studies. None of the programs that I have consulted for this chapter contextualize anthropological cinema as the sole privilege of academia. Rather, they suggest an approach to scientific research as a creative practice with the potential to make an impact beyond academic institutions and beyond the discipline of anthropology. I see these events as an assessment of the contours of anthropologically informed practices through cinema. From this position, the anthropological film festival represents a space where “anthropological cinema” is reproduced and deconstructed. This subtle balance frames anthropological cinema as an open and specific project and the film festival as a site where this project is framed and re-framed.

Anthropological film festival developments The anthropological film festival format was preceded by anthropologists showing their footage to students and colleagues in lectures, workshops, seminars, and at international professional meetings like the American Anthropological Association (Piault, 2017).These events were, 314

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ostensibly, for academic anthropologists to showcase and share their work with colleagues and design a research program for visual anthropology (Piault, 2017, p. 44).The irony, however, was that while these spaces were being created, the practices that were being discussed and produced struggled for recognition in academic anthropology (2017, p. 41). In this environment, anthropologists interested in filmmaking found themselves networking through different disciplinary networks and producing events on the margins of academic anthropology (Paz Peirano and Vallejo 2017). María Paz Peirano relates the development of the anthropological film festival format to the institutionalization of visual anthropology, its development as a discipline, and its struggle for recognition as a legitimate academic practice (Paz Peirano, 2017, p. 27). Paz Peirano describes a context, from the 1950’s onward, of the professionalization of visual anthropology, which enabled an increase in platforms that produced, distributed, and exhibited ethnographic cinema. Examples of the emerging institutionalization of visual anthropology include the formation of the Comité du Film Ethnographique founded in Paris in 1953, the UNESCO Round Table on Ethnographic Film in the Pacific Area held in Sydney in 1966, the 1968 Colloquium on Ethnographic Film convened in UCLA, and the Conference on Visual Anthropology held at the University of Illinois in 1973, which resulted in the publication of Principles of Visual Anthropology, a reader on visual anthropology edited by Paul Hockings (Piault, 2017, pp. 43–44). Collette Piault offers an engaging description of the themes that were addressed in these types of events that is worth quoting: the themes treated at conferences can be gathered around general topics, often controversial ones: • • •

The nature and specificity of ethnographic films, history, attempts at definition and categories, evaluation, future, scientific or non-scientific, backward discussion, The aesthetics of ethnographic films, relationships with art, with written work, The analysis of the relationships with the “Other” through filming.

And also, in restricted workshops: • • • •

Technical problems: sound, lighting, condition of production, teaching archiving and conservation, How to film different subjects: minorities, rituals, music, technology, social change, relationships and conflicts, intimacy, etc., How to transmit knowledge through films: contextualization, The question of cultural and linguistic translation, and the possible devices to use: commentary, the interviews, voice over, captions (Piault, 2017, p. 55).

This list of themes is suggestive of the questions that anthropologists/film-makers were confronting in their projects: how to theorize the power relationships at stake when filming minorities, their relationship to art and science, the role of text in their projects, and the politics of representation.They also addressed narrative issues such as how to film themes with no immediate visual substance such as social change, relationships, conflict, and intimacy. This list also suggests a concern with defining ethnographic film in relation to other cinematic conventions. Collette Piault describes how, following the 1966 edition of Florence’s Festival di Popoli, Jean Rouch organized a three-day discussion and screening seminar titled “Evaluation of Ethnographic and Folkloristic Films” where the festival’s program was discussed and films that were not part of the official program were screened. Piault speculates that these events repre315

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sented the “first international public opportunity in Europe for open public discussion of ethnographic films” (Piault, 2017, p.43).While Piault also references events taking place in the United States and Australia that also addressed anthropological cinema around the same period, Rouch’s events were formatted within the context of a film festival.The precedents were contextualized with universities, academic organizations, and UNESCO with a clear connection to academic anthropology and resulting in the publication of seminal texts in the field (Piault, 2017). Rouch continued with the template of post-festival screenings at the Cinema du Réel (Festival International de Films Ethnographiques et Sociologiques) in Paris.The Cinema du Réel festival was founded in 1978 when Rouch and Jean Michel Arnold transferred the L’homme regarde l’homme festival to the Center Georges Pompidou and renamed it accordingly. According to Piault, the main programs of the first Cinema du Réel editions were more devoted to “the promotion of social documentaries with a political connotation” and films about society, communities, minorities, and other research topics associated with Social Anthropology and Sociology (Piault, 2017, p. 43). Piault suggests that, while the festival programmed films under the label of “Ethnographic or Sociological Film Festival,” its vision of what constitutes anthropological cinema was focused more on the films’ content or plot, leaving the methodological and cinematic approaches of anthropological cinema on the side (2017). Rouch’s post-event seminars, entitled Les Regardes Comparés, can be seen as a corrective to this oversight. According to Nadine Wanono, the Les Regardes Comparés program was designed as a specialized event within the Cinema du Réel which would offer “a concrete space where students, ethnographers, sociologists, film-makers, artists and non-specialist audiences could share films produced in the same geographical or cultural area but from very distinctive points of view” (Wanono, 2017, p. 193). For Ginsburg, these events brought together people from all over the world, including anthropologists, film-makers, television executives, video artists, amateur movie makers, as well as people from the societies being viewed, to begin to see how different media agendas, as well as the culture/nationality and gender of producers, shape the images produced. (Ginsburg, 1995, p.66) The curatorial remit of the Les Regardes Comparés program suggests an event that would highlight the specific mise en scene and cinematic approach that was being developed by individual film-makers working in different disciplines (Wanono, 2017, p. 193). This curatorial decision compares, contrasts, and discusses all sorts of films, from the perspective of anthropology. I would also suggest that they illustrate an emerging trope in anthropological film festival programming where the event is (1) generated as a response to another event, (2) concerned with the articulation of anthropological cinema as a distinct cinematic practice, rather than a method to illustrate anthropological theory, (3) networked across disciplinary fields, and (4) responsible for articulating an agenda through screenings in a film festival, rather than through conference proceedings. The knowledge produced at these events is event-based, experience-centered theory that is developed from the experience of the screenings and the discussions they generate. In 1982, Jean Rouch and Françoise Foucault branched out from Cinema du Réel and created their own festival, Le Bilan, at the Musee de l’Homme in Paris. The first programs of Le Bilan featured projects that would otherwise struggle for inclusion in the mainstream documentary festival circuit such as student films and films made in formats that were not recognized by other festivals, like Super 8 (Wanono, 2017, p. 201).Wanono describes what must have been an engaging program that “encouraged innovative approaches and fostered new styles among film-makers, ethnographers, and students in Visual Anthropology” (p. 201). The curatorial line 316

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of these early programs emphasized the reflexive quality of the films. According to Wanono, Rouch’s assessment of the quality of a film “came from the ways of looking and establishing the relationship with the people being filmed, and from your ability to render this relationship on screen” (p. 201).While this approach can be traced to Rouch’s theory on “shared anthropology” (Rouch, 1975), I find the ramifications of this statement compelling.The statement denotes that cinema’s reflexive capability—the tools that cinema has available to document and represent its own production process—was identified as a valued characteristic of anthropological cinema practice by the late 1970’s. It represents a move away from understanding cinema exclusively as a data gathering methodology and acknowledges the intersubjective qualities of film-making during fieldwork. On May 26, 1987, in Moscow, the Council for Science and Documentary Film Theory and Criticism of the Union of Cinematographers of the USSR and the Folklore Commission co-organized an event entitled “What is Visual Anthropology?” (Vasileva and Trushkina, 2017). The event featured a program of three films made by Estonian ethnologist and film-maker Lennart Meri followed by a moderated discussion with Soviet philologist and anthropologist Vyacheslav Vsevolodovich. During the event, Lennart Meri announced that a festival of Visual Anthropology was to be held later that year in Tallinn, Estonia. An extract from the announcement reads, The Commission of Visual Anthropology of the Union of Cinematographers of Estonia and the Folklore Commission of the Union of Composers of the USSR will hold 27–30 October, 1987 in Tallinn, the joint seminar in Visual Anthropology devoted to ethnographic films. Authors of ethnographic, folkloric, ethnomusical and other films, film documents on rituals, ceremonies, traditional forms of material and spiritual culture are invited to the seminar. The purpose of the seminar is to define the concept of Visual Anthropology and its current level in national and foreign cinematography, to discuss the theory and practice of Visual Anthropology, questions of authenticity of the film document, clashes of scientific and general cinema, organizational and technical issues connected with filming in field conditions. (Vasileva and Trushkina, 2017, pp. 102–103) This announcement, and the event in which it took place, was preceded by a series of regular screening events and folk music concerts organized by the Folklore Commission that had taken place in Moscow since 1972. Vasileva and Trushkina contextualize the Moscow events within the period of the “Khrushchev Thaw” (associated with the mid-1950’s to mid-1960’s), which coincided with an increasing academic and public interest in local folkloric practices (Vasileva and Trushkina, 2017).While initial research materials focused on musical practices of ethnic minorities and Indigenous people of the USSR, it soon expanded to a broader interest in researching localized ethnographic experiences such as art, religion, and language.The 1987 events represented an early, perhaps first, instance where content associated with the Folkloric Commission screenings and events was described as “visual anthropology,” while at the same time not being entirely confident as to what visual anthropology was. The venue of the October 1987 event was changed to the western Estonian town of Pärnu and its format altered from “seminar” to “festival” (Vasileva and Trushkina, 2017).The Pärnu program featured films that had previously been screened at the European Ethnographic Seminar in Budapest earlier that year and a selection of films from the Folklore Commission programs held in Moscow.The program consisted of 47 films and attracted 51 film-makers from 14 different countries including the likes of Jean Rouch, Jay Ruby,Alan Lomax, Marc Piault, and Asen 317

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Balicki, amongst others. The event has been held on an annual basis since then and continues to this day. The story of the Pärnu Film Festival shares thematic threads with the Paris story. Both cases were responses to other events and inspired other events in turn. This theme is present in the story of many other European film festivals. For example, the Nordic Anthropological Film Association’s Film Festival (NAFA), Europe’s oldest running anthropological film festival, has directly inspired the founding of other film festivals such as the ASTRA Film Festival in Sibiu, Romania, Maailma Film Festival in Tartu Estonia, and the Viscult Festival in Joensuu, Finland. Eddy Appels, curator of the Beeld voor Beeld Festival in Amsterdam, recalls that the initiative to organize the Beeld voor Beeld came as a direct response to Le Bilan (Appels, 2017). The Riga Pasaules Film Festival, held annually in Riga, was directly inspired by the ASTRA Film Festival and Maailma Film Festival.These events also serve as networking sites for other events. The NAFA and Le Bilan, for example, have served as an important meeting point of the future organizers of the Royal Anthropological Institute Film Festival (RAI) and the Göttingen Film Festival (Crawford, 2017;Wanono, 2017). These instances point to the rhizome-like qualities of the anthropological film festivals in Europe. In other words, they are the products of networks and generate networks of their own. Anthropological film festival curators contextualize content that generates new discussions, new relationships, and fosters a sense of community building over the film program.This requires, I suggest, the presentation of a film program that contests, develops, and builds on conventions associated with anthropological cinema, rather than presenting a report or survey of the latest developments in the field (Cubero, 2017). Another thematic thread in the stories of Paris and Pärnu is that they are networked through various disciplinary strands, which leads to trans-disciplinary programs that address common ground across different fields. If Paris was institutionally networked through the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) and Le Musée de l’Homme, the network of the Soviet case centered on the emerging field of folklorists, their initial interest in music, and the state cinema industry. Both programs were curated around a reflexive exploratory theme that required a trans-disciplinary discussion—i.e.,“what is anthropological cinema?”,“what are its characteristics?”,“how is it different from other genres?” I suggest that the questions posed by these curators were not meant to be answered definitively and categorically. I interpret these questions as curators’ attempts to describe their curatorial practices in the format of a question. The questions are pursued through choice of films, their order, choice of venue, formats of presentation, social events, Q&As, and the discussions that arise from the event. Done in this way, a film festival has an experimental and spontaneous quality to it, akin to a “happening,” an interactive event. In this “experiment” the curator is not an arbiter of the answer to the festival’s research question nor a librarian that identifies and displays research materials for a single scientific community. Rather, the curator designs an event around a particular research question that frames an experience for the participants, who are encouraged to engage actively with the program. The result is a trans-disciplinary event, which attracts an increasingly diverse audience, convened under the banner of “anthropology.” However, each program is constituted through its own set of disciplinary networks and their collective efforts do not represent a singular definition for “anthropological cinema.” Another thematic thread amongst anthropological film festivals is their concern with formats and screening platforms.The stories of the development of the Paris and Pärnu events are directly related to the development of their format (e.g., seminar, round-table, conference, film festival) and screening platforms (e.g., analog, digital, museums, cinemas, culture halls, interactive events). Contemporary anthropological film programs continue the practice of experiment318

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ing with their formats and platforms. For example, the 2012 edition of Le Bilan inaugurated a section called Narrativités Singulières, which featured digital technologies in order to question the linearity of the audio-visual medium and showcase aesthetic approaches that are afforded by computer software (Wanono, 2017, p 203). Eddy Appels describes programs held within the Beeld voor Beeld which included concerts, live cinema music, and programming across different venues (Appels, 2017).The Margaret Mead Film Festival also spreads out its program across different venues in New York City and features alternative content such as multimedia installations, video games, kinetic sculptures, and performances, amongst other activities.The ASTRA Film Festival, held in Sibiu Romania, also features content across different venues as well as different immersive platforms such as virtual reality and dome screenings.This characteristic should not come as a surprise given that the “tools” that curators have to contextualize content are related to formatting and screening platforms.

Relationship to anthropology The features I outlined above—festivals’ rhizome-like network, trans-disciplinarity, and concern over format—set the stage for the programming of content that would not be easily recognized as legitimate academic practice. Conversely, visual anthropologists working in European academic contexts struggle with gaining academic credibility and research assessment recognition with research material presented at film festivals or other venues that are not related to academia, like the academic conference or university-organized seminar.These circumstances contribute to a paradoxical situation where anthropological film festivals showcase content that is not recognized as “anthropological” by academia, while at the same time the anthropological film festival is the site where discourses and practices of “anthropological cinema” are generated. I suggest that this is indicative of a general tension that anthropological film festival curators contend with (Cubero, 2017). While their programs are informed by anthropological approaches, as articulated by academia, curators engage with these approaches through cinema. In doing so, they examine, critique, contest, and at times oppose academic approaches to anthropology and its ostensible text bias. Curators have engaged with this paradox in numerous ways. The Margaret Mead Film Festival and the Göttingen International Ethnographic Film Festival (GIEFF), for example, have removed words, such as “anthropological” and “ethnographic” from their funding and marketing materials in order to disassociate the event from academic anthropology. In the case of the GIEFF, Engelbrecht suggests that the decision to disassociate the program from academic anthropology was made in the context of re-structuring funding schemes in Germany, which put the GIEFF team in a position to seek independent funding (Engelbrecht, 2017). Regardless of the reasons that curators may have for these decisions, these practices have resulted in curators having to contend with an increased variety in submissions produced outside of academic and anthropological contexts and an increased interest from an audience that is not associated with academic anthropology (see Engelbrecht, 2017; Henley, 2017).This has also empowered curators to consider programming content that, while informed by anthropological approaches, would not receive attention in academic circles. Anthropological film festivals contextualize anthropological cinema outside of the university.They promote a cinematic practice that spirals from academia, networks through different disciplinary fields, while maintaining a methodological vision. A challenge for anthropological film festival curators is the responsibility that comes with presenting a program of a cinematic practice that is contested, historically contingent, and without categorical guidelines to define it (see Banks, 1992; Henley, 2000; Ruby, 1975).The lack of clear definition of “anthropological 319

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cinema” may cause difficulties from the fund-raising perspective (see Engelbrecht, 2017) and securing public attention (Henley, 2017). I would argue, however, that the absence of a genretype definition for “anthropological cinema” favors creative curating practices. It offers curators more thematic materials to work with and to design their events along experimental lines, rather than as the articulation of a ready-made research program. Anthropological film festivals maintain a complex position, in the sense that they are events that put “anthropological cinema culture” on display, at the same time as they interrogate and contest approaches that homogenize or offer a categorical definition of “anthropological cinema.” The anthropological film festivals play a complex role in the discussion on the terms of anthropological cinema. On the one hand, anthropological film festivals are important nodes in the circulation of ideas and practices that inform anthropological cinema—works acquire a sense of credibility in relation to the film festivals which screen them, at the same time as film festivals gain credibility in relation to the content they program. They are also events where different networks are convened with “anthropological cinema” on the agenda. However, I would not support the view that anthropological film festivals simply showcase the latest “state of affairs” of the discipline, nor do I see them as the site where the research agenda is set. I see anthropological film festivals as curated gatherings with subtle intentions, which are more connected to the dispositions, network, and agenda of the curating team. Curators of anthropological film festivals contribute to the field through the presentation of a program that is made up of materials that were submitted to them through various networks. This contributes to a program where the works do not exhibit consistent tropes, characters, tone, or content that would help critics identify “anthropological cinema” as a film genre.The label “anthropological” may suggest a film that has been made through a process of participant observation, has an immersive effect, is self-reflexive, and maintains a consistent authored point of view. However, the fact is that the project of anthropological cinema is ongoing and assumes different permutations as it traverses through different disciplinary networks.This is compounded by the situation that anthropological methods and theories are not the sole privilege of degreeholding anthropologists. Contemporary anthropological film festivals attract multiple stakeholders representing different traditions within the arts and humanities who come to anthropology events seeking collaborations, conversations, and feedback on their work. From this perspective, the anthropological film festival does not define “anthropological cinema” or “ethnographic film” nor does it delimit its scope. I would rather suggest that the anthropological film festival program is based on an exploratory agenda, which critically examines the terms of anthropologically informed works and expands the possibilities of anthropological cinema and its network.

Conclusion The anthropological film festival is the product and generator of a peculiar network.A network that is distinct from academic anthropology and to other film festival networks (Paz Peirano, 2017, p. 22). Each individual anthropological film festival responds to its own configuration of interests and approaches that makes it stand out in relation to other programs. Anthropological film festivals can be networked through museums, through independent cinemas, through professional academic organizations, have a goal to promote anthropological cinema’s value for pedagogy, have an activist agenda, focus on the relationship with genre cinema such as experimental films or animations. Some programs focus on specific regions, some offer prizes and others do not, they market to and attract different audiences, some focus on the films’ content, others on the directors who make them.These organizational and curatorial choices inform the identity of the event and the type of generative effects it is going to have. 320

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My experiences in attending and curating anthropological film programs have highlighted the emotive, trans-subjective experience of watching and making films. The final decisions to program a certain film and the decision on the final order of the films comes down to the “feeling” of a work, its aesthetic and methodological relationship to the rest of the films, and to how the film contributes to the story of the film festival. I have found that curators working in the field of visual anthropology select films for their capacity to engage an audience through the works themselves, rather than the works’ capacity to illustrate or stand as evidence for text-based anthropological ideas. In this regard, the films featured in these programs do not emphasize the representation of research conclusions or the illustration of anthropological fieldwork. Rather, the programs understand ethnographic cinema as more along the lines of, to paraphrase Robert Gardner, “a visual exercise which could impart concentrates and precipitates of a social experience” (Gardner, 2007, p. 14). For Gardner, watching a film series resembles watching a “gigantic dance,” which is apprehended as a series of beats, of intervals of gesture and movement. Watching films does not entail analyzing people’s behavior but is more of a development of a way of knowing and a form of communion, sharing a sense of accomplishment between the characters, the scenes, the filmmaker, and audience.The viewer gets to know how people can know and trust each other. For Gardner, his aim would be through a “kind of human and actual animation, a series of linked and woven sequences, all echoing each other” (Gardner, 2007, p. 14). This approach contrasts with the understanding of ethnographic cinema as a representation, analysis, exposition, or illustration of culture (see MacDougall, 2005; Ruby, 2000), whereby viewing a film is an exercise in appreciating the way it represents a context that pre-exists the film-maker and judges the film-maker’s skill in capturing that context. Supporters of this approach may understand ethnographic film as a scientific report on research findings, which must include a documentation of the methodologies used (Ruby, 1975). Supporters of this approach could make the case that it is not enough to engage with the affects associated with a social experience, but that these affects must be placed in a broader theoretical context, which ultimately requires text and discourse. However, my observations of recent programming practices indicate attempts to articulate a different kind of anthropology. In one instance, these programs stress that cinema—anthropological or otherwise—operates on a different register than text. An implicit agenda behind these programs is that the development of a genuine anthropological cinema must engage with the complexities of the medium it is working with (MacDougall, 2005).This position enables a contribution that expands the limits of anthropological discourse and contributes to cinematic practices.The kind of anthropology that emerges in these cases is a non-discursive practise, more akin to an approach than a method, and articulates an anthropology for the service of cinema, rather than a cinema for the service of anthropology. This trend speaks to the open-ended quality of the anthropological film festival and to its capacity to articulate new contexts and formats. Along the way, it holds the capacity not only to contribute to the narrative of “visual anthropology” but also to transcend its own terms and articulate radically different alternatives for anthropological and documentary practice and discourse.

Note 1 I will refer to ethnographic film festivals as anthropological film festivals but I will do so in full awareness of the transdisciplinarity of both ethnography and ethnographic film, as well as anthropological cinema in general.

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References Appels, E. (2017). 25 Years of Beeld voor Beeld festival and visual anthropology in the Netherlands. In A. Vallejo & M. Paz (Eds.), Film festivals and anthropology (pp. 223–234). Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Banks, M. (1992).Which films are the ethnographic ones? In P. Ian Crawford & D.Turton (Eds.), Film as ethnography (pp. 116–130). Manchester: Manchester University Press. Cousins, M. (2013). Widescreen on film festivals (2006)/film festival form: A manifesto (2012). In D. Iordanova (Ed.), The film festival reader (pp. 167–172). St Andrews: St Andrews Film Studies. Crawford, P. (2017).The nordic eye revisited. NAFA, 1975–2015. In A.Vallejo & M. Paz Peirano (Eds.), Film festivals and anthropology (pp. 179–191). Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Cubero, C. (2017).The artful narrative of anthropological film festivals:View from the Baltics. In A.Vallejo & M. Paz Peirano (Eds.), Film festivals and anthropology (pp. 111–123). Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Engelbrecht, B. (2017). Organisational challenges when programming an ethnographic film festival: Lessons from Göttingen. In A. Vallejo & M. Paz Peirano (Eds.), Film festivals and anthropology (pp. 235–247). Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Gardner, R. (2007). The making of dead birds: Chronicle of a film. C.Warren (Ed.). Cambridge, MA: Peabody Museum Press. Ginsburg, F. (1995). The parallax effect: The impact of aboriginal media on ethnographic film. Visual Anthropology Review, 11(2), 64–76. Henley, P. (2000). Ethnographic film:Technology, practice and anthropological theory. Visual Anthropology, 13(2), 207–226. Henley, P. (2017).The film festival of the Royal Anthropological Institute: A personal memoir on its thirtieth anniversary. In A. Vallejo & M. Paz Peirano (Eds.), Film festivals and anthropology (pp. 207–222). Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. MacDougall, D. (2005). The corporeal image: Film, ethnography, and the senses. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Paz Peirano, M. (2017). Mapping ethnographic film festivals: A world overview. In A. Vallejo & M. Paz Peirano (Eds.), Film festivals and anthropology (pp. 21–36) Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Paz Peirano, M., & Vallejo, A. (2017). Introduction: Film festival and anthropology. In A.Vallejo & M. Paz Peirano (Eds.), Film festivals and anthropology (pp. 1–17). Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Piault, C. (2017). Chapter 1. Festivals, conferences, seminar, and networks in visual anthropology in Europe. In A.Vallejo & M. Paz Peirano (Eds.), Film festivals and anthropology (pp. 39–67). Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Rouch, J. (1975). The camera and man. In P. Hockings (Ed.), Principles of visual anthropology (pp. 79–98). Berlin:Walter de Gruyter. Ruby, J. (1975). Is an Enthnographic Film a Filmic Ethnography? Studies in Visual Communication, 2(2), 104–111. Ruby, J. (2000). Picturing culture: Explorations of film and anthropology. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Vasileva,V., & Trushkina, E. (2017).Visual anthropology in the USSR and post-soviet Russia: A history of festival practices. In A.Vallejo & M. Paz Peirano (Eds.), Film festivals and anthropology (pp. 89–110). Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Wanono, N. (2017). Les Regards Comparés and Les Bilan du Film Ethnographique: Jean Rouch’s initiatives. In A.Vallejo & M. Paz Peirano (Eds.), Film festivals and anthropology (pp. 193–206). Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

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30 EVERYTHING YOU’VE ALWAYS WANTED TO ASK ETHNOGRAPHIC FILMMAKER BUT NEVER HAD A CHANCE TO A roundtable discussion Phillip Vannini, Peter Biella, Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier, Carlo Cubero, Lorenzo Ferrarini, Harjant Gill, Kathy Kasic, Molly Merriman, Mark Westmoreland, and Chris Wright

Few ethnographic filmmakers or practitioners of video-based methods are fortunate enough to find themselves surrounded by lots of like-minded colleagues, equally passionate as they are about technical issues surrounding the pre-production, production, and distribution of researchbased video work. While it is possible to find occasional discussions of “behind-the-scenes” reflections in the pages of select journals, for the most part most of us work in silos from one another, unaware of how we carry out our work differently or, perhaps, in similar ways. In recognition of the fact that answers to practical issues are often impossible to find, I (Phillip Vannini) asked the contributors to this handbook a few questions that my students and I have always wanted to ask ethnographic filmmakers and that we never had the chance to ask. In order to obtain as many answers as possible I compiled a long list of questions on many subjects and fired it off to the contributors to this handbook. I asked them—if they had some time to spare—to formulate a few informal answers to whichever questions they fancied, even if totally off-the-cuff and quick.Their answers are contained in this chapter, after minimal editing. And just because I couldn’t resist, I answered a few of those questions too.Answers are presented in alphabetical order following last names.

Do you ever enter into partnerships with commercial production companies/broadcasters before commencing work? Peter Biella: “I virtually always produce/direct/shoot/edit my films. Once I was hired by a group affiliated with PBS in Philadelphia to shoot a film I believed in.The producers asked Bill Moyers to introduce the film, which he was willing to do because he too believed in the topic. His introduction to the film contributed enormously to its credibility and the fact that it was selected to air all over the US.” 325

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Carlo Cubero: “Of course! It is always good to collaborate with industries that you aren’t associated with. Anthropologists can learn a lot from the ways in which commercial broadcasting tell stories. Commercial television gets a lot of heat from anthropologists because of their content and the way they approach the material.You can pick and choose what to take-away from your collaborators.” Kathy Kasic: “I have done it both ways.You have more creative freedom doing it on your own, but you may not get as many viewers. It’s also harder to change up your film if you sign on with a broadcaster after the fact, so it may be a good idea to make sure you can hire an editor so you don’t have to change things yourself.” Molly Merryman: “No. In the past I did used to have partnerships with my local PBS station, but they no longer work with film production.” Phillip Vannini: “I have been fortunate enough to develop good working relations with a commercial distributor and a producer working for a Canadian public network, so I typically get in touch with them at the beginning stages of a project to get some feedback and gauge their interest.”

Do you write a script or treatment of any kind? Why/why not? Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier: “No, never. I always have an idea in mind of what I want to do but I just let things happen, in a more spontaneous way so I may provoke things when I am in the production phase. But nothing is usually planned in advance.” Peter Biella: “I depart for the field with a general idea of what I am going to shoot. However, as Dwight Eisenhower once said,‘In preparing for battle … plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.’ In the field, I always have a ‘shopping list’: a list of topics I think are important. I keep the list in mind when I begin shooting.This gives me ideas to pursue until I discover that my original ideas were either impossible or not as interesting as something else that is available. About three-quarters of the way through the weeks of production, I gain a more solid idea of what the film is and what I still need. My shopping list changes and I’m able to anticipate exactly what remains to be done. My script, or list, are works in progress. Note that the less time you have to shoot, the more you must depend—for better or worse—on your original script / shopping list. Carlo Cubero: “Writing a script or treatment is a very good way for setting the terms of your project.While there are many traditions within documentary practise that value improvisation (and some of these traditions may have been your main inspiration), creative improvisation requires a frame, question, approach, references, etc. Otherwise, you and your team run the risk of not knowing what to do during the different stages of production. If, perhaps, you are interested in making a film that is solely based on your intuition—as the surrealists would claim—you should attempt to articulate this intuitive concern for yourself, even if it is a reactionary concern. Ultimately, the main advantage of creating a treatment in advance is to avoid the possibility that you lose your audience.” Lorenzo Ferrarini: “Yes. Even if you don’t plan to work with fictional or enacted elements, writing a script or at least a treatment is a good way to plan ahead and devise representational strategies that work hand in hand with your theoretical questions. Integrating a script with shooting lists helps obtain rushes that are easier to edit.Any script, though, requires an open mind and capacity to improvise.” Harjant Gill: “Yes! For me, a script or a treatment is like a roadmap that gives me the confidence to start traveling in one particular direction. I am well aware of the fact that 326

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I might not end up following this map, and will most likely traverse a different path altogether, but having that map gives me the confidence to embark on my journey.” Kathy Kasic: “I don’t usually write treatments unless I am applying for a grant that requires it, but I may write a script because I find it helpful to wrap my mind around a story idea. I think it’s also helpful to write it out because it lets you see the length of what you are going for and can sometimes help to push a film beyond traditional storytelling ideas.That way when you move into production you do so with a slightly more advanced approach and a pretty good idea of what you need to do. It’s also useful for sorting out the shots that I need or want to get. Sometimes the fact that you wrote down a scene will push you to get a more difficult, but powerful shot. Of course, you need to be aware that the final film may not resemble the script at all, and you have to be flexible enough to allow for that. For documentaries my scripts tend to be of the two-column format—with picture on the left, audio on the right.” Molly Merryman: “For my ethnographically based documentaries, I only write up a basic description (enough for IRB approvals and grant-writing). I then immerse myself, film and edit—allowing the subjects to shape the outcome. I also make oral-history-based videos, and those have an oral history guide, but no script.” Mark Westmoreland: “Generally, no. But I do like to storyboard ideas.Thinking about locations and events. Planning how to get good coverage. But most of the time this is more impromptu and improvised.” Chris Wright: “My visual work always grows out of lots of extensive notes, drawings, and collages.These visualizations start in sketchbooks and then develop in many different forms before I film anything. I will even do this kind of visual work if I only have an hour’s notice before having to go and film.This doesn’t mean that I always have a set vision of what I will actually do during the filming, or a script or storyboard of any kind, but I do have a series of images, or visual resonances that act as a guide. I find this really helps.”

Does it matter to you to have a “story” before starting the production of a film? Why? Peter Biella: “Compassion, intimacy, fascinating people to film.These are needed: the story follows from them.” Lorenzo Ferrarini: “Having a story is a big help for a film project but, again, I think there is space in ethnographic film today for approaches that avoid conventional narratives.” Kathy Kasic: “Not always. Sometimes the story reveals itself to you in the middle of a shoot. Or sometimes there really is not a story and I make something more experimental. Sometimes I might start shooting just to get some inspiration. If I do that though, I usually need to be alone. I don’t like making everyone else wade through the beginnings of my creative process. I often feel like my best shooting comes when I am by myself and almost in a meditative state, watching the world.” Molly Merryman: “No.The story emerges in editing. I have a general topic before production, but I don’t know the story until I am shooting, and I don’t shape the story until editing.” Mark Westmoreland: “I don’t strictly work with the goal of a story. But stories come in all forms. There is a story I tell funders and bureaucrats to make it legible. There is the story I tell myself to guide my process.There is perhaps the story that my interlocutors have about me or the project.And there is the story I want to impart to my audience, 327

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which might not be narrative at all.All these storylines are in constant flux during the production and even well afterwards with new contexts of engagement.”

What are your key strategies to secure grant funding? Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier: “Show that are you organized (which goes a little bit against what I answered in the question about writing treatments or scripts), that you are backed-up with solid theory and that you know that other anthropologists who have done similar / different projects. Show that you know what you are talking about.” Peter Biella: “Collaborate with good people. If you’re a beginner, allow yourself to work with people more experienced than you. Keep your first budgets low, so the granting agency will know it is not taking a huge risk on a beginner. Build up your list of moderate grant successes, so the funders can see that you consistently deliver what you promise. Attend festivals, meet people, talk about movies and collaboration. Don’t be afraid to seek out and ask questions of successful filmmakers who do what you want to do. I never met one, when I was a beginner, who was not happy to lend me a hand.” Carlo Cubero: “Embrace negative responses. See them as an opportunity to consider alternative options and formats for your film. Getting rejected doesn’t necessarily mean that your film idea is bad or not creative enough. Rejections can be associated with funders being in a position to fund few projects in a field that is saturated. It can also be related to lack of clarity in your project proposal.” Harjant Gill: “Apply again and again! My projects have been rejected by countless funding organizations. I am always gracious in my communications with the organization personnel, I always request feedback and express an interest in reapplying, and often end up securing the grant upon second or third attempt.” Kathy Kasic: “The biggest strategy is to understand the goals of the funding agency.” Molly Merryman: “I try to get funding from within my university to demonstrate to external agencies that there is an initial investment. Often I take a more DIY approach and don’t seek funding. Depending on the subject matter, the chances of wasting time grant writing are very high.” Phillip Vannini: “Nearly all of my films have been made in combination with written ethnographies, so when I seek funding for a project, I propose to deliver articles, a book, and a video (or more than one video). Funders are very keen on knowledge mobilization outside the academy and understand that film plays a very important role in public education.” Mark Westmoreland: “Long-term permanent employment at a university. Seriously, I make low budget work, so try to pool resources from small funding sources at the university, while sustaining my livelihood through institutional servitude. Otherwise, target a variety of small grants for projects in different phases with different kinds of outputs.”

What should I do to keep my budget low? Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier: “Work with a small team, basic equipment, take longer but do it yourself.” Peter Biella: “Don’t quit your day job until you can afford it. Use university equipment if you can. Expect to work 12 to 14-hour days.To keep my expenses low when I was a beginner I had cheap rent and roommates. When I was an anthropology professor, I had a tolerant artist partner and we delayed having offspring, which I realized would 328

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require me to earn real money. Since 90% of filmmaking is editing, your salary for editing will be a huge percentage of your work. Expect to spend at least 30 hours per minute of finished film. When you start out and don’t have any money, work with talented unknowns. (NB: If you have even a glimmering of bad feeling about them on first meeting, trust your feeling and don’t take a chance. Bad blood—particularly when you are just beginning as a filmmaker—is enormously debilitating. I finally concluded that the only sane thing to do was administer MMPIs to anyone I expected to spend 24 hours a day with.” Carlo Cubero: “Decide what aspect of the film production process isn’t a priority or what kind of hand-made solutions you can achieve.Your film is the product of an environment that the director creates for the team and the informants.Your budget is the cost of this ‘environment.’ Are you offering catering, use private or public transportation, use domestic or professional lights, how important is sound for you, etc. I think it isn’t professional to ask ‘friends’ to work for free. Respect their craft and the time they are giving to you as a director.You must decide, however, what kind of environment you wish to provide the team.” Lorenzo Ferrarini: “There are many options, but I would say that the more roles you can cover on your own, the more you can save. Especially for post-production: paying sound mixers/editors, video editors, colorists, etc., can quickly become very expensive.” Molly Merryman: “DIY—I do most everything myself. Equipment is good these days—for most work you don’t need a crew. I secure as much equipment as possible from my university—internal money is easier to get than external money, and in the US money for filmmaking is rare, especially difficult for low-budget filmmakers to get.” Mark Westmoreland: “Work solo or with one other person, perhaps a local. Put more money into good quality audio equipment than camera. Audio recording electronics don’t change as frequently as image electronics, so your investment will stay valuable for many years. You can always find shoestring solutions with DIY. Look up videos by DSLR and cellphone filmmakers for instance.They are a wealth of ideas and technical inspiration.”

What do you do to convince your director/dean to give you time and other resources to shoot a film? Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier: “Connect the film topic with other research and writing projects. Show that the visual will allow you to write something about the experience, the film, etc. Show that you will go to conferences, film festivals, etc. Show that what you do is part of more standard ‘academia.’” Peter Biella: “I was first author of ‘AAA Guidelines for the Evaluation of Ethnographic Visual Media’ (Society for Visual Anthropology, 2015) which was published in 2001 and updated in 2015. It was endorsed unanimously by the AAA Board of Directors. Since its publication, about 50 anthropologists have told me that putting this essay in the hands of their deans and departmental colleagues was invaluable in their efforts to get tenure and funding based on their media publications. It tells people how to judge good film works— which most anthropologists and deans do not know how to do—and it states that the AAA Board of Directors considers media publications like films as valuable to the discipline and therefore as worthy of recognition for tenure and funding, as textual works. Of course, to make this work, you have to have a good idea 329

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and the capacity to pull it off. For that, work with demonstrably capable people.Think about the tombstone of Andrew Carnegie, ‘Here lies a man who knew how to enlist in his service better men than himself.’” Carlo Cubero: “You need to make a case. The more technical the better. Don’t blame the talent. Explain, in technical terms, what are the circumstances under which you are working under and why is it that your story needs more time. During all this, keep in mind that the priority is the FILM, not the egos.” Molly Merryman: “I give the college/university credit in the film, ensure publicity for the university, tie in screenings with other initiatives, such as student recruitment, fundraising, etc.” Mark Westmoreland: “Haven’t been successful in that front exactly, but have coupled some efforts to digital learning initiatives to justify time and resources.”

What are your most genuine goals for making an ethnographic film? Peter Biella: “I’m a believer in C.Wright Mills’ admonition to create ‘biography in history.’ I believe anthropological films can create ‘virtual intimacy,’ which allow inroads of compassion for otherwise hostile or even racist viewers (see for example Biella, 2009). I very much enjoy combining artistic skill and the capacity to think things through. Many of my films have applied components. I have worked for many years on films about teaching Indigenous focus groups through the use of culture-specific AIDS education media. I see film as an important medium for participatory action research.” Carlo Cubero: “Therapy. Making a documentary is a very powerful experience and it puts you in a position to grow as a researcher and as a person. You will be having very intense interactions with a group of people during a short period of time. Filmmaking is a mutually transforming process and I think it is important to keep this in mind.” Lorenzo Ferrarini: “It is a product of my work that I can share and discuss with the people with whom I work, unlike academic writing. And, unlike academic writing, I enjoy the process very much.” Harjant Gill: “I make films to give something back to my interlocutors and to communities among whom I work. In exchange for their time and sharing their stories, I am able to give them a chronicle of their lives that they can watch, share with their family members and community, and pass down from generation to generation. As an ethnographer, it is the most genuine gift that one can give back to their interlocutors, their own stories in language and style that they understand and appreciate.” Molly Merryman: “Revealing a truth not known to most people and providing people and communities who don’t have access to the means of storytelling an opportunity to have their lives represented in a meaningful and honest manner.” Mark Westmoreland: “To have a sincere interaction with other people about something meaningful to us both, while mutually creating a record of our engagement and assembling it in a way that has the potential to activate other audiences for the betterment of all life on the planet and beyond. Seriously, it is an incredible privilege for people to share their lives with us and I feel blessed by these opportunities to share their experience and understanding of the world.” Chris Wright: “Audiovisual work grows out of an intense engagement with people, places, objects, weather etc. and whether that is based on an afternoon, or many years of involvement my central concern is trying to make something that reveals the beauty of that engagement. I think ethnographic filmmaking itself is sometimes like a kind of 330

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extended performance piece: that act of paying attention to someone, some moment or place. I like Merleau-Ponty’s idea that vision is a kind of magic or delirium (Merleau-Ponty, M. 1964. Eye and Mind in the Primacy of Perception and other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology. Northwestern University Press.) and I’m always trying to communicate that.” Phillip Vannini: “I am lucky enough if I can get 10,000 readers for any one of my written ethnographies.A well-produced film on the same subject can get me at least 100 times that many. For me ethnographic film is about reaching the general public with something they can enjoy learning from.”

What should I do convince my university’s ethical review board that shooting film is legit? Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier: “Just admit that you can’t secure either anonymity or confidentiality of the participants and include a sentence in the consent form (might be the consent form of a bigger project) asking the participants to sign that they are aware they will be filmed, that the film will be available on the Internet.” Peter Biella: “Consult with members of the board and with others at the university who have done the same kind of work before. Become intimately familiar with Health and Human Services guidelines. I have convinced my university recognize my vérité films to be the film equivalent of ‘oral histories.’As such, they are not ‘research’ as the term is defined by HHS, and are therefore exempt from IRB oversight (see Office for Human Research Protection, 2018).” Carlo Cubero: “It seems to me that this is a technical and legal process. You’ll need to review the ethics associated in your field with filming and collecting footage. In Europe, for example, the guidelines aren’t very clear. I have gathered that the actual regulations are onerous and counter-productive for filming. Ultimately, universities are worried about getting sued or that one of their projects is associated with a public scandal. In order to allay this fear, consider demonstrating to your review board, in their own terms, how is it that you have developed positive relationships with your informants and/or topic.” Harjant Gill: “I suggest treating your film proposal like a research proposal and undergo the necessary training and applications needed to obtain a clearance from your university’s IRB. In my experience, the IRB is less interested in the feasibility of your project, and more interested in knowing (and demonstrating) that you are aware of the potential risks that are involved in your project.As long as you are upfront and honest about any potential risks in your research protocol and in your informed consent, IRB should approve your project. Getting a clearance from the IRB is essential for all research projects and ethnographic studies involving human beings, and film and filmmaking is no exception.” Molly Merryman: “Show them academic statements of film/recording ethics (for example I use statements from the American Anthropological Association, US Oral History Association, UK Oral History Society). Demonstrate other examples of ethical, academic filmmaking. Prepare a proposal that demonstrates your commitment to upholding the rights of your subjects. Include the release forms you will use.Anticipate what their concerns might be and prepare for them.” Phillip Vannini: “Remind them how many people read the average peer-reviewed journal article and how many, instead, watch documentaries.” 331

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Mark Westmoreland: “Look at the ethical guidelines provided by the AAA and other scholarly organizations. The latest challenge (specifically in Europe) is with data privacy laws.Things are always changing, getting more restrictive. It’s important to keep track of what other industries do from journalism to art initiatives.”

Does it matter to you to identify central “characters” before starting the production of a film? Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier: “No, again that’s the type of thing I’m more aware of looking for during the production time. But yes, when I’m producing the film, I’m looking for charismatic and ‘special’ characters.” Peter Biella: “My longer “biography in history” films are planned with protagonists identified from the beginning.Yet there is something very exciting about jumping into the field and finding new people and their stories.” Carlo Cubero: “No. It is OK to have ‘types’ or characteristics that you are after in order to tell the story. But it is OK to find your main character in fieldwork.That said, I would support having a clear idea of the character because it will help your pitch, fundraising, and general direction of the project.” Lorenzo Ferrarini: “I think an ethnographic film can have other leading elements than a ‘character.’ A place, a concept, or even a formal structure can be equally central in a successful film.” Kathy Kasic: “I’m all about being flexible with the story. So, it isn’t essential to have central characters ahead of time, but sometimes it helps to organize the story structure, and that gives you a direction going into the shoot.Then if the story takes another turn, you need to be adaptable enough to change your story and even the main characters. If you research a story in advance of shooting, it will usually give you a good idea of who will be a good central character. For those films that happen in the moment, perhaps about an event that is unfolding, it can be harder to tease out the main characters until you are deep in the story. I’ve also had it where I thought I had a main character, but the film really became about a collection of ‘co-operative characters,’ to use John Grierson’s term.” Molly Merryman: “No. I do find entry into the community I am focused on, but that person or those people might not be who is best filmed.The ‘characters’ reveal themselves in the field. If you have selected someone beforehand, you might miss the truth or the best story.” Mark Westmoreland: “Central characters tend to emerge during the research process, but sometimes the project is defined by certain gate keepers who may become key figures in the film. I do not think all films should be character-driven and am quite interested in forms that do things differently.”

What camera(s) do you use? Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier: “Canon 7D.” Peter Biella: “I use Sony video cameras in the $3,000 to $4,000 range. Some festivals specialize in big-budgets, with 4 or 5K cameras, drones, submersibles. Unless there is a powerful justification, these machines are used as means to hide the absence of ideas. No matter how inexpensive a camera is, the filmmaker’s best strategy is to know the camera inside out. Do this by conducting enough tests to understand its D-Log E 332

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curve perfectly. Learn to use the Zebras feature. I always have Zebras turned on when I shoot.” Lorenzo Ferrarini: “I have used the Panasonic GH series for a while, they are compact mirrorless photographic cameras that record excellent video. Currently I am using the GH5 model.” Harjant Gill: “DSLR, or other prosumer camcorders that shoot HD footage.” Kathy Kasic: “I like to use different cameras depending on what I need to shoot. It’s changed a bit over the years, but the general characteristics are sort of what I like in a person: somewhat flexible, likes to chase the light, but isn’t afraid when it gets a little dark, can listen well and can see the world in different perspectives.That means it should have good dynamic range, low light capability, XLR inputs for sound / decent preamps, and the ability to have interchangeable lenses.” Molly Merryman: “I have used many different cameras over the years. I don’t recommend any brands because different cameras are better depending on uses. I have used highend broadcast video cameras, GoPro cameras, and am even using ipads with Padcaster attachments for a current oral history project (because it is easily mastered by non-film students and community volunteers).” Chris Wright: “Everything from a handmade wooden pinhole camera, to a GoPro and a DSLR. I started my filmmaking on 16mm and Super 8 equipment and I still sometimes use Super 8. I prefer the idea that it’s only possible to record a limited amount of footage and still approach using a DSLR like that. I find that the focus that gives you really helps with decisions about what to record. Shooting too much footage is a problem. I hardly ever use any kind of DV camera other than a GoPro.” Phillip Vannini: “I have long used a Canon 5D Mk III, but in 2016 I graduated to a more demanding one: a Black Magic Ursa Mini. I still use the 5D whenever the Ursa is too heavy to carry around, as it’s not so “Mini” after all.” Mark Westmoreland: “iPhone 6S, GoPro Fusion 360, GoPro Hero4, Lumix GH2 micro4/3rd, Sony HD PXW-X70C, Sony Digital8 DCR-TRV320.”

What kind of lenses do you use? Peter Biella: “Except in very unusual circumstances, I use the zoom lens that comes with the camera.” Lorenzo Ferrarini: “A mixture of prime and zoom lenses. For me it is important that they are bright but at the same time compact, for portability. I would really welcome compact lenses that have reliable mechanical focus and are parfocal. I don’t care too much for autofocus.” Molly Merryman: “I have used Sony Carl Zeiss lenses, the standard mount lenses on Canons, and Padcaster lenses for ipad uses.” Chris Wright: “With a DSLR I use a converter and a range of old Nikon non-autofocus lenses including a macro lens, and sometimes a pin-hole cap. I also have a range of really old antique 19th century glass lenses that I attach to a DSLR with some homemade converters.” Phillip Vannini: “I think most ethnographers need four lenses: three zoom lenses like a wide angle one, a normal one, and telephoto, and then a prime lens like a 50mm.Those four are always in my camera backpack.” Mark Westmoreland: “Wide-angle.” 333

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What kind of sound recorders do you use? Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier: “Zoom H4.” Peter Biella: “Combination of umbilical-chord single-system recording and external Zoom recorder.” Lorenzo Ferrarini: “I use a small sound recorder with integrated microphones and a larger, better quality one to use with external XLR microphones, depending on the situation.” Molly Merryman: “I generally am in the field alone, so I record sound on the camera. when I am using a more high-end camera I want one with an XLR connector, as I find the heavier wires and connections hold up better.” Phillip Vannini: “Zoom H5n.” Mark Westmoreland: “Tascam DR-40, Zoom H1.” Chris Wright: “I mostly use a Sound Devices Mix Pre 3. It’s small, lightweight and easy to use.”

Lavalier or shotgun mics? Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier: “Both.” Peter Biella: “I rarely use Lavalieres; I prefer Sennheiser semi-shotguns and wireless mics. They are less cumbersome and allow the people being filmed to move around a bit more freely.” Lorenzo Ferrarini: “Lavaliers (especially in a wireless system) are very convenient for singlesystem shooters.A well-placed shotgun, however, sounds better to my ears.” Harjant Gill: “Both, if possible. Good sound quality is the most important feature that determines the success of the film, and having both mics ensures maximum coverage in the event that one mic fails.” Kathy Kasic: “I always have both ready to go and where possible, record the sound with at least two microphones.” Molly Merryman: “Both. Depends on the situation.” Chris Wright: “I hardly ever use Lavalier mics. I like the way that using a mic that is somehow ‘attached’ to you forces you to consider how you move—how close or distant you are—when you’re filming, and that’s really useful. So I mostly use a ‘short’ shotgun mic although I have also used contact mics and even some handmade mics on occasions, especially when recording sound separately. I often record a lot of sound completely separately from any filming activity, I find the separation of film and sound both technically and intellectually a really productive and creative move.” Phillip Vannini: “For most of my filming my ‘subjects’ are busy moving around, so I put a lav on them and ask them to slip my Zoom 5Hn into a pocket.” Mark Westmoreland: “Cardioid mounted on camera (e.g., Sennheiser ME64) combined with wireless lavalier as needed.Alternatively, Zoom H1 mounted to hotshoe for secondary source.Also, independent sound recording.”

Do you have a sound operator or do you do it all yourself? Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier: “By myself or a helper / assistant.” Peter Biella: “I always work with a sound operator, someone who may also be co-director and co-shooter.The person doing sound is not distracted by the all-consuming task of 334

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peeping at the camera image and making subtle adjustments; as such, the sound person can look around, keep his/her eyes open—see and point out new important things that the camera person cannot see while watching the screen.” Harjant Gill: “I have a sound operator at all times.” Kathy Kasic: “I usually do it all myself, but I do like working with sound recordists. It just isn’t always feasible.” Lorenzo Ferrarini: “I do it all myself but I should really work with a sound recordist for better results.The way I work is also a consequence of the way my projects derive from personal involvement and experiences.” Molly Merryman: “With few exceptions, me.” Mark Westmoreland: “Usually solo.”

Do you have a camera operator or do you do it all yourself? Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier: “Myself or assistant.” Peter Biella: “Len Kamerling and I traded off the camera in our last film; I have never worked on a film I didn’t shoot much of the time.” Harjant Gill: “I have a camera-person/director of photography who is responsible for operating the camera. We meet before the shoot to discuss the various shots and angles needed. When the cameras are rolling, my attention is focused entirely on my interviewee.” Kathy Kasic: “I like to shoot, so it’s hard to give that up completely. I do work with additional camera people though. I’ve often found the need to have a multi-camera shoot.” Molly Merryman: “With few exceptions, me.” Mark Westmoreland: “I’ve done both, but enjoy shooting my own materials.”

What kind of filters do you carry around? Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier: “No filters.” Peter Biella: “None.” Lorenzo Ferrarini: “Because the camera I use doesn’t have an integrated one, I carry an ND filter, of the variable kind. I am not happy with this solution because it limits the quality of the image, alters the colour rendition, and can create vignetting. It is also not very practical, but it is an inevitable choice if you want to keep the shutter speed at the right setting.” Harjant Gill: “ND filter; UV filter.” Molly Merryman: “I rarely use them anymore.” Phillip Vannini:“The two that I use the most are a circular polarizer and a variable ND (Neutral Density). I don’t think I could do much work outdoors without my variable ND.” Mark Westmoreland: “ND.”

Do you shoot handheld, with a tripod, or monopod? Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier: “Handheld.” Peter Biella: “I can hand-hold steadily enough to satisfy myself for no more than 20 minutes at a stroke. I don’t care for monopods and use a fluid-head tripod 99% of the time. In a pinch, I will pick up the tripod and walk around with it, the camera attached. I recommend weight training as a necessary part of preparing for the field.” 335

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Lorenzo Ferrarini: “I prefer to avoid tripods but I don’t make it an ideological issue, as Rouch or the observational tradition did. Some projects require a certain formal look that a tripod can provide, or it can be a practical issue. I have also used active stabilizers such as 3-axis gimbals.” Harjant Gill: “All of the above.” Kathy Kasic: “Handheld, tripod, steadicam. I hardly ever use a monopod on the ground, but I have a harness that has a monopod embedded in it, and that works well. I have used all kinds of things to keep a camera still though—rocks, bags filled with black beans, fence posts—I use what’s available. I like shooting handheld, I think you get better moments from it. If I’m going to be on sticks, I need it to be really smooth and so that often means I shoot with a sturdy tripod. I have several tripods, but I’ve had the same favorite for the last 12 years, a Sachtler 20P. I think everyone should invest in a tripod, they really don’t go out of date very easily, so your $5K or 10K lasts a lot longer than buying a camera.” Molly Merryman: “All, plus a shoulder stabilization rig.” Phillip Vannini: “I use a tripod for sit-down interviews and shots that require smooth camera movement. I go handheld otherwise. I hate shaky shots and I often find myself stabilizing them in post-production.” Mark Westmoreland: “In order of preference: handheld, monopod, tripod.”

How big should my crew be? Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier: “Two-three people max.” Peter Biella: “I would not want to bring more than three people into Maasai homesteads for very long. I usually work with two others.” Harjant Gill: “4–5 people including the director. In addition to cameraperson and sound recordist, a line-producer or an assistant director and a production assistant is helpful to have.” Kathy Kasic: “Go small for a documentary. Unless it’s a performance shoot or with actors, it’s best to keep the number of people at a minimum. It keeps your characters feeling at ease and more natural.” Molly Merryman: “That depends on the project and budget. I’ve had from one to a dozen.” Mark Westmoreland: “Depends on what you’re making.”

Do you scout locations in advance of shooting? Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier: “Not usually.Very rarely.” Peter Biella: “I usually know where I’m going in advance.When I don’t, as when someone is taking me someplace, I consider that they have done the scouting for me.” Harjant Gill: “Yes! When scouting locations, I look for any possible disruptions (visual or audible), any potential releases that need to be secured, sources of electricity and lighting conditions.” Molly Merryman: “If it is central to the film, and I am able to.” Mark Westmoreland: “I believe in spending as much time in a place you’re shooting as possible to really notice what’s happening and how to best observe it. I teach my students to do a series of successive field studies through different modalities (drawing, mapping, sound, photo, video) as location scouting as each mode provides another insight.”

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Do you shoot in 4K? Peter Biella: “Not yet.” Lorenzo Ferrarini: “Yes. My guideline is, shoot at the best quality you can afford. Note that resolution is only one of the components making up ‘quality.’ Also consider bit depth, chroma subsampling, data rate compression.” Kathy Kasic: “I think this question will be outdated soon. We never seem to be satisfied with the number of pixels on a screen. So yes, I shoot in 4K, just to keep people’s eyes pixeled.” Molly Merryman: “Depends on the project. If it is an immersive film, yes. For my oral history projects, no—because storage of long interviews would be prohibitive.” Phillip Vannini: “At times. But just as often I find myself shooting in 2K or UHD just to give myself options in post, either for the sake of re-framing, zooming in, or stabilization.” Mark Westmoreland: “I avoid it due to data processing requirements.”

How do you prepare yourself for remote and otherwise challenging locations? Peter Biella: “‘One is none and two is one.’ I suggest that filmmakers bring two of every piece of equipment that they have the capacity to bring. Bring two of everything (within reason) you can afford and have the strength to carry. This is of course true for memory chips and hard drives. Bring minimal equipment to repair the gear when something goes wrong. Before you leave, become reasonably competent in knowing how to hotwire DC batteries, how volt meters work, how to repair mic cables, and clean dirty lenses and equipment without ruining them. You need to think about health and safety before leaving for the shoot; have a plan for how to contend with mosquitos and accidents. Bring all the medicine you need as well as extra supplies; bring spare glasses, pens and paper. Have a zippable bag for receipts.Arrange clear fallback plans with your team if things go wrong. Be sure that everybody on the team has copies of everybody else’s passport, contact and emergency information. Everyone should carry a functioning cell phone, must know local laws and expectations; must avoid sex and trouble with the locals. It this is your first trip to a region, talk to (or, better, go with) people who have been there before. Obey when a local person says ‘NO’ to a dangerous plan you propose. Temper ‘you can’t know until you try’ with ‘don’t be an idiot.’ Sign up to receive State Department travel advisories in the country where you are filming.” Carlo Cubero: “Research the site in advance as much as you can. Filming in extreme cold conditions, at sea, in the heat, in places with limited electricity, all have a direct impact on your shoot. It is important that you prepare yourself in advance for any technical issues that may arise.” Lorenzo Ferrarini: “I try to understand what is the essential equipment that I will need, based on experience and on talking to people who know the situation.Too much equipment can be a burden and sometimes even endanger you or the people trying to help you. The exception to this rule applies only to batteries and memory cards, of which I prefer to carry more than I anticipate needing.Additionally, remember that filmmaking is a physically demanding activity and you need to be lucid and fit, so you can’t just plan for filming but you need to think about water, food and weather. In general, speaking to local people is an invaluable resource.”

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Harjant Gill: “Have a lot of contingencies in place! Assume what can go wrong will go wrong and have a back-up plan in the event that Murphy’s Law manifests itself.” Molly Merryman: “One thing is exercise to ensure I have the stamina and strength for lots of equipment lugging and extended filming.Another is to bring enough gear, backups on everything, and food and water.” Mark Westmoreland: “How will you carry and protect your gear? How will you charge your batteries? How will you back up your data? These are the most important issues. For everything else, go-with-the-flow.”

How do you prepare yourself for potentially unsecure shooting locations? Peter Biella: “It depends on the type of insecurity. Once in El Salvador my team went so far as to hide our footage each day to protect ourselves and our informants if we were arrested. In all cases, keep a low profile: do not advertise what you are doing or that you have expensive film gear. Disguise your film bags to make them look like ordinary travel bags. Make a small footprint. Don’t be loud. Don’t get drunk. Stay below the radar. Develop local contacts who can watch your back. Let your team and contacts always know where you are, how you are travelling and when you expect to be back. Keep in cell phone contact with your team. Don’t take unnecessary risks. Learn to recognize symptoms of the documentary filmmaker’s internal-macho virus and take countermeasures.” Mark Westmoreland: “I ask someone with local shooting knowledge. Being aware of the representational and image-making context to which you are contributing requires doing your homework in advance and knowing what might be sensitive. I go with others to lend support and presence.”

What do you do after a day of shooting? Peter Biella: “Talk things over with the crew each day: what worked (with congratulations), did not work (without rancour), how to do better; what you expect to do the next day. Each day, download everything you shot, sync it up, and visually spot check footage from each location. Keep a folder dedicated to a clean paper record of what you shot each day. Each day, charge batteries, clean the gear and make sure each piece will work flawlessly the next day. Before going to sleep, leave the gear in ready-condition so that if the phone rings at 8 am, you can be ready to shoot at 8:20.” Carlo Cubero: “Transfer the footage to a hard drive and charge the batteries. Talk with the team and/or informants about how the shooting went. Talk about the next day and potential directions the story can take.Talk about the context of the story. Rest.” Lorenzo Ferrarini: “I don’t always do this, but a good rule is to back up your footage and recordings, clean and reset your equipment, and take at least brief notes to help you log your material later.” Kathy Kasic: “Offload cards, have a drink and close my eyes.” Molly Merriman: “If I don’t have another day of shooting I back up everything.” Mark Westmoreland: “Back up all my footage and materials, charge my batteries, dust off my equipment, make notes about the day and the data, plan for the next day. Have drinks and dinner with co-producers.” 338

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Do you use artificial lights? Peter Biella: “I always have a reflector in the field (which can also serve as a wind screen). If I’m near electricity (rare for me), I use available electric lights as needed.When I shoot in the US, I often take a light kit.” Lorenzo Ferrarini: “In general I use them only when it’s too dark to film without them, but as for tripods there is no observational ideology behind this choice. Learning to work with available light allows me to travel light and be ready to film in any moment.There is much that can be done with subject positioning, camera angle, and re-arranging existing light sources.” Kathy Kasic: “Yes, sometimes.” Molly Merryman: “Rarely. I have a fairly light-weight kit I may use for oral history interviews, but never for ethnographic films.” Mark Westmoreland: “Only if unavoidable.” Chris Wright: “I am really aware of light, especially having started out using 16mm cameras without any auto settings, but I have never used artificial lights. Light is also something that I often think about more in terms of what I am intending to do with the final film. If it is going to be projected then I take that into account, but often my audiovisual work is not intended to be projected or to be largescale and besides I really like the ‘murk’ of natural light and the lack of visibility it sometimes imposes.There is often nothing worse than clear, bright, total visibility.”

Do you do “re-takes”? Peter Biella: “In one documentary, I realized about three-quarters of the way through production that the scenes I had shot needed my protagonist to introduce each with a few sync-sound remarks. I wrote drafts of what I thought the audience would need to understand and what he should say: with only one revision, he had no problems with what I wrote and he delivered the introductions. We shot one or two takes of these introductions. Other than that one aspect of that film, I have not shot retakes in decades. My shooting policy is to go-with-the-flow. If I miss it, I miss it. Asking for a retake contaminates the agreement I have with my participants; I ask them to let me film, but not to perform or pay considerable attention to my work.The purpose of a retake is to get the filmmaker out of trouble.The ideal solution is not to get in trouble in the first place.Trouble often comes from messing up a shot by trying complicated moves—pans, tracking, follow-focus and zooms. If you do them perfectly, you can make a shot memorable. If you do them badly, you lose everything. My rule is that, to stay out of trouble when the content of the event is so important that I can’t afford to lose it, I keep my camera moves simple, no more complicated than I can easily handle.When factors allow some risks to be taken, I consider the risks and count on my shooting ratio to guarantee that I will have enough memorable material.When I was in film school, I practiced several hours a week executing complex camera moves. Part of this practice was to memorize whether clockwise or counter-clockwise turns on the lens focus it closer or farther.” Carlo Cubero: “All the time. There are different kinds of re-takes.You can reference your own scenes and direct your informants. If you are going to do an actual repetition of the same phrase and action, be aware that it could look ‘acted’ and the audience will see through your artifice.” 339

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Lorenzo Ferrarini: “Yes, I have done a number of re-takes in some situations, within films that included enacted sequences. However, I keep a close eye on how the people I film feel about the repetition of a sequence, and prefer not to ask them to do things they might find awkward or stupid.” Molly Merryman: “No.” Mark Westmoreland: “Possibly, but not generally.”

How do you deal with shy, skeptical, or otherwise generally uncooperative “subjects”? Peter Biella: “I make films with people who want the film to be made. I show them films I have made before to give them an idea of what they can expect. If people don’t want to be filmed, I don’t argue with them and don’t film them. If a person’s participation is very important for the film—or if I think something they are not anxious to say is very important to include—I talk it over with them.Talking is not arguing.The person then either agrees or does not. Before filming, I co-sign (or verbally agree to) a contract with the people I want to film. The agreement is that I will delete any footage they decide they do not like. So far, no one has ever asked me to delete anything.Vulnerable people—wives—have asked me not to show particular clips to certain people.This has caused me sometimes to screen different versions of a film to different people.” Carlo Cubero: “They aren’t interested in being part of your movie. Move on. Productive collaborations must be the initiative of your informants. If they aren’t interested in participating in your project, you won’t get results my manipulating, cajoling, or paying for their services.The film will reflect the manipulative nature of the relationship and the audience will notice.” Lorenzo Ferrarini: “I think that explaining in accessible terms what you have in mind will go very far in gaining a person’s cooperation and participation in a filmic project.Sometimes you can point out how their agenda and yours overlap in the film, to give them additional motivation. Some people are just not interested, though, and I respect that.” Kathy Kasic: “If the person is shy because they don’t like the attention, I’ll film other people first, so they don’t feel like they are in the limelight.Those kinds of people tend to be ok if everyone else is being filmed, not just them. Sometimes I’ll even film things that really will never make it in the final film, just so they start to get more comfortable and so that they aren’t as worried about the one thing they said. If they say more things, they have less concern that they said one thing wrong. I also will try to reduce the importance of the camera, by hardly paying any attention to it. So, I try to relax, not looking much at the camera, or fussing over buttons. If I’m tense with the camera, so will my subjects be. If they are uncooperative because they don’t trust your viewpoint, it helps to ask lots of questions and to listen to their perspective. Eventually they may open up, or not.They may just flat out refuse to talk and there isn’t much you can do about that.” Molly Merryman: “For shy—I don’t force anything. Sometimes with immersion they see you so much, or hear from others in the film and want to join in. If they are skeptical I might show them other films I’ve done or talk to them more about my background or intentions.” Mark Westmoreland: “Sometimes it is finding a new way to describe their role in the project. During a shoot in rural Ethiopia, I had success with the analogy that the movie Titanic wasn’t about a boat, but it’s the human element in the story of the ship that is so compelling. My protagonists incorporated this story in their own explanations to others.” 340

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What do you tell your “subjects” to instruct them before an interview or a shooting session? Peter Biella: “I usually treat interview-content to be highly problematic, not ideal material.When I use them, I treat as the source of questions that the film needs to explain; I do not treat interviews as explanations. Interviews may be part of research.When filming them, my team lets people keep talking, and we listen closely.We have a list of topics (our shopping list) and when we hear a person getting close to a key interest, we encourage them to expand.We do not give a lot of preliminary instruction. Usually we don’t have a tight agenda.” Carlo Cubero: “I tell them the general treatment of the story and why their contribution would be useful for the film.” Lorenzo Ferrarini: “I think it is very important that you share with people the ideas that you are exploring with the film, get them to understand why their story is important for you and for those who could potentially watch the film.With close collaborators, though, I share my vision of what a scene should look like, and we watch the footage later on. Following Flaherty’s lead, it is important that they understand what I’m trying to do to be able to help me, so I have often even used editing in the field to hold screenings of rough cuts. I see this as an empowering process, one that leaves the editing process more open to their comments and allows them to improvise or suggest with more competence and affect my original plan.” Molly Merryman: “I remind them of their rights, that they can stop the session at any time, and to otherwise ignore me/my camera.” Mark Westmoreland: “Where to look or who to look at if more than one crew member? Maybe give them some context for what I would like to discuss. And, naturally, ask their permission.”

How do you travel with all your stuff? Peter Biella: “When moving, we keep the gear bags in sight or somewhere it is impossible to steal them from without alerting us.All the gear that we can’t-live-without is with us, carried inside the body of the plane. Clothes and such replaceable items go in suitcases stored under the plane. When we reach our location, we find a safe base or two and extra gear stays there.We don’t travel alone when carrying the gear.We seek ways to avoid making it obvious that we are carrying valuable gear in the field.” Lorenzo Ferrarini: “I have a Pelican waterproof hard case that is quite indestructible but still carry-on compliant. I put all my most important equipment in there, although often the camera itself will be on me in a small bag.” Molly Merryman: “I prefer when I can drive, so I can load lots of extra gear.When I film in other countries, I have to fly, so tend to go more for hardier gear, use backpacks and rolling bags, and carry small back-up drives as well as upload footage to Vimeo.” Mark Westmoreland: “Nothing of importance gets checked. I organize all my valuable and essential equipment in my carryon luggage and prepare to open it for security. Once on location, particularly if I have a lot of equipment, I use a series of smaller bags that can be nested in a larger bag.”

What are your preferred ways and tools to log your footage? Peter Biella: “A large part of each shooting week is spent translating and creating subtitles, so production and post-production mingle. I use a subtitle and translation authoring 341

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application called InqScribe which interfaces with Premiere and Final Cut. Sometimes (rarely) in the field I find that translation triage is necessary.We don’t translate scenes that I have little faith in, since a half-hour of words may take five hours to subtitle translate. But ideally, everything reasonably decent is subtitled and—along with its timecode and representative sync image—will eventually be printed out on paper for reference during editing. Seventeen hours of footage equals about 500 pages of frame accurate subtitled translated printed pages. With these, I fill one or two holepunch binders. Each scene has its own date and name, each clip its own date, name, chip number and timecode in-point. For storyboarding I use 3×5 cards with different colored inks signifying the scene, clip, representative audio and quality. I use push-pins to move these cards around—in anticipated film order—on one or two 4×8-foot foam core surfaces. Eventually, when I decide how long the film will be and form my best guess about which scenes will be kept, I proceed as follows. I write the name of each scene on a 3×5 card and place all the scene cards on the floor. I then count out as many wooden matches as I want there to be minutes in the film and distribute the matches among each of the named scenes.This lets me know that I have allowed myself only so many minutes to each scene, and I hold myself to that length when editing. This simplifies editing, because as soon as I identify the maximum length a scene can have, I am forced to commit to the ‘can’t live without’ footage and I am freed from wasting time fine-cutting footage that has already been bumped out. In Premiere (or Final Cut) I make timelines for all of the clips that belong in all of the scenes I have shot.These clips all have their subtitle translations in place. I study the scene timelines and their transcriptions until I am ready to propose an order for the film. I don’t spend too much time on assembly or rough cuts, because I’ve made many films I can judge accurately without them. I do a medium or medium fine cut on my first pass. I do not recommend this shortcut for beginning filmmakers, because—unless they force themselves to study all of their footage in assembly and rough cuts—they will waste weeks or even months fine-cutting scenes they will later throw out.” Molly Merryman: “I am so old school—I still prefer notes—usually on a tablet. I do load use bins and other organizing tools within the editing software.” Mark Westmoreland: “I usually begin with a rough log using pen and paper and trying to review the footage soon after shooting to see if I missed something or need to follow up. If I haven’t already, I transfer to another drive, batch rename it, and organize it into a folder root system by location and date. Based on this structure I can import the existing metadata into a spreadsheet, which I modify to include several additional qualitative fields that I complete on subsequent focused viewings.These spreadsheets with hyperlinked media files will be the basis of a process of logging and analyzing across themes, characters, locations, events, etc. This also provides a structure that is reproduced in my editing application.”

How do you generate your film’s story during post-production? Peter Biella: “Some films are much easier than others. Some make themselves. One took me 30 years (on and off). In all cases, I try and see if various cuts of the film achieve what I’m looking for in front of friends, family and colleagues. For the first two years of editing my 30 year film—Changa Revisited—the different versions consistently ended up being a film I didn’t want to make.We pushed and pushed looking for a way out, and my collaborator/co-editors finally convinced me into doing something I had 342

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always rejected—including footage I’d shot 30 years before.They were right and the puzzle was finally solved.” Carlo Cubero: “If you are ‘stuck’ and don’t know where to start I suggest that you begin with your favourite scenes. Scenes that you are happy with, for whatever reason. Lay those scenes on the time-line and polish them.Along the way, you will find a path.” Lorenzo Ferrarini: “Most of the time in editing I follow a storyline that I had envisaged during production. In most of my projects, though, editing starts in the field and is dialogic, so it is open to the comments and suggestions of the people I have filmed. I also think that having a community of scholars able to give you feedback on a film is invaluable and at the Granada Centre, where I work, I run a seminar for work-inprogress work, where we exchange suggestions with colleagues and students.” Molly Merryman: “I review footage, see what emerges, try some edits, drink some scotch, sleep on it, re-edit, and repeat.” Mark Westmoreland: “Editing is an incredibly intuitive process, but you can easily get lost in the surplus of footage. I try to work through a process of carefully combing through the materials and consolidating them into more manageable time-based units.This is a process I adapted from my colleague Metje Postma. I’ll begin with a selection of one hour or so of my most relevant footage that may show the main topics in my research. From this I will try to select a sequence of activity, that is, a group of shots unified in space and time with respect to the profilmic reality. I may conceptualize these as descriptive sequences, depicting significant events, characteristic activities, important interactions, character profiles, etc. I will also identify expository sequences that depict people telling significant stories, oral histories and biographies, public speeches, in/ formal interviews, important verbal interactions, dialogue, etc. Lastly, I begin to identify conceptual sequences that highlight, symbolize, or hint at the core themes, ideas, arguments, methodologies, etc. Once I have these basic units, then I might shift to making scenes, which I understand as a group of shots unified in space and time with respect to the structure of the film. This is an inevitable transition, but I try to understand my footage as sequences before manipulating its structure into constructed scenes. Scenes for me include key scenes that help me make an argument, tell a story, or otherwise elaborate a core concept, theme, or topic. I also note any reflexive scenes that expose, reflect upon, or otherwise thematize my presence in the field site and/ or your subject’s reaction to the ethnographer/filmmaker. Once I’ve done enough of these to have a collection of inter-related scenes, I begin to place them together on a timeline in 15–20--minute chunks. I then look for potential opening and closing scenes that introduce the viewer to this world and then consider how to exit this world and give a sense of closure. Potential gaps are reconsidered, and I delve back into the footage that I had dismissed. For here I create a rough cut based on various paper edit exercises to think about macro and meso structures.At this point I go into a prolonged phase of fine tuning and getting feedback from others.”

Do you pre-screen your film with your research participants to gain their approval before public dissemination? Peter Biella: “Not usually, since my protagonists live 14,000 miles from where I usually edit. I bring finished films back, if and when I can. I bring back versions that differ from those shown to American and European viewers, in order to respect the wishes of some protagonists not to allow others to hear some of the things they said on camera.” 343

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Carlo Cubero: “The final cut, yes. I don’t show footage or rough cuts. This may produce expectations with your informants and may result in disappointments when the final cut is released.” Lorenzo Ferrarini: “I have done this in case of sensitive subjects (for example filming topics related to initiation among donso hunters in Burkina Faso). If I have the chance, I’ll do it as much as I can, but I see it more as a chance for people to have a preview and to object to possible misrepresentations, rather than a process of approval.” Molly Merryman: “Usually—I try to. I prefer showing to groups, to elicit better feedback. But sometimes people aren’t interested or can’t be located after filming.” Mark Westmoreland: “Preferably.”

What kind of machine do you edit with? Peter Biella: “Macs with many gigs of RAM and ROM.” Lorenzo Ferrarini: “A MacBook Pro which is currently 4 years old, but still allows me to edit 4K footage thanks to a proxy workflow.” Molly Merryman: “Mac. Usually MacBook Pro.” Phillip Vannini: “I have an all-out war with Mac products. High-end HP computers will kick Apple’s butt any day.” Mark Westmoreland: “MacBook Pro using Adobe CC.”

What are the five top software that you feel you couldn’t edit without? Peter Biella: “InqScribe and Final Cut or Premiere. If the budget allows, I hire someone more skilful than I to use Sound Edit Pro and DaVinci software for sound sweetening and color correction.” Harjant Gill: “Final Cut Pro 7 and Adobe Premiere.” Molly Merryman: “Final Cut or Premiere.” Phillip Vannini: “I like to edit with Adobe Premiere and do color work on DaVinci Resolve. Plural Eyes is amazing for syncing up sound with footage. Neat Video is my favorite denoiser outside of Resolve.And Microsoft Excel is ideal for logging footage.” Mark Westmoreland: “Premiere, Photoshop, Bridge, After Effects, Audition (but honestly, VLC, Handbrake, Audacity, Ocenaudio, and Keynote may all play important supporting roles).”

Do you hire someone to assist you with editing? Peter Biella: “I have, but lately I have worked with an apprentice student or alone.” Lorenzo Ferrarini: “Having an editor is really something to recommend, especially if you shot your own film, because some external eyes (and ears) who have not experienced the place and situation are invaluable in judging how much of it will be transmitted to the viewers. It is a luxury, however, and since that function can—up to a point—be performed by the comments of a preview audience, I tend to do without a dedicated editor. Be aware that acquiring the technical skills and sensibility of a competent editor is a considerable time investment, though. If I had the budget I would certainly consider relying on the experience of a professional.” Molly Merryman: “If I am aiming toward broadcast, I will hire a post-production editor. I do the basic timeline editing myself, but I find that others are much more skilled at color correction, sound design, graphics creation and final preparations.” 344

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Mark Westmoreland: “I’ve been hiring students to develop ideas we’ve discussed then possibly modifying further on my own. It’s mostly about being efficient with my time, but I like what another set of eyes bring to the equation.”

What is your favorite film festival? Peter Biella: “World Film in Estonia, Astra in Romania, RAI in Britain, Zanzibar International. The Margaret Mead Festival doesn’t screen my work for some reason.” Carlo Cubero: “There is a great list of festivals at visualanthropology.net/category/festivals/ and also at worldfilm.ee/caffe.” Lorenzo Ferrarini: “In the latest editions the RAI Ethnographic Film Festival has become a really good event open to experimental approaches from anthropologists and filmmakers with an ethnographic sensibility, plus the atmosphere is very friendly.” Molly Merryman: “Whichever one accepts my work!” Mark Westmoreland: “The Flaherty Seminar (not precisely a festival, but it’s pretty festive).”

What advice do you have for someone looking for a distributor? Peter Biella: “Make a good film and don’t expect to make money.” Molly Merryman: “I’ve never gone after distribution.” Phillip Vannini: “Be sure they are honest and reliable.They also need to understand that you are an ethnographer first and foremost.” Mark Westmoreland: “What’s the market for your topic and style? Is it worth exploring multiple deals for different regions and forms of output?”

Should I give my film away for free? Peter Biella: “Having a legitimate distributor is a significant criterion for tenure, promotion and grants. Don’t be disappointed if you make very little money for distribution of anthropologically focused films; grants can keep you alive for many months a year. Have a day job—such as teaching—to make ends meet.” Carlo Cubero: “Only to academic institutions who will use your film for pedagogical purposes.” Lorenzo Ferrarini: “I think selling our films can be a way to make the point that our work in film is worth as much as our work in writing. However, as it happens for writing, open access can be a great way to democratize academic knowledge and reaching a wider audience. I try to make my films available for free, but in some cases I have sold them to then transfer the profits to the people who appear in the film and collaborated with me on the production.” Molly Merryman: “I do, but I can. I have institutional support for my films, and I want the communities I film to use them and have access to them.” Mark Westmoreland: “Most likely you’ll want to give it freely to quite a few people, but on a case by case basis. Best if you can frontend funding, so as not to rely on recouping anything with sales and distribution.”

Should I add music to my film? Peter Biella: “This depends on the film. Is it a sync film? Is it poetic? If the music is nondiegetic, members of the Society for Visual Anthropology are almost all in agreement that the music must be a part of the community / culture being filmed.” 345

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Harjant Gill: “Yes! As long as you have secured the copyrights and necessary permission to use that music in your film.” Molly Merryman: “It depends. Does it take away or add to the authenticity?” Chris Wright: “I have a real tendency to be fanatical about NOT adding any music to film unless it is clearly diegetic—it comes from the scene of the filmmaking. But I do use ambient sound as though it was music and I’m happy to post-produce the ambient sound in lots of different ways. For example, enhancing the sounds of an abandoned building—the hum of an electric light, the deep bass of wind through railings (recorded using a contact mic).” Phillip Vannini: “It depends on the project. Much of my work is commercially distributed on TV or mass-auddience VOD and SVOD and most popular audiences are accustomed to extra-diegetic music. Music helps with pacing and can underscore certain kinds of affect you want to generate. If you do decide to add music, there is no better investment than working with a composer who will score the right music for your film. Do not choose it yourself.” Mark Westmoreland: “Not if you’re on a hunt with Jean Rouch. Seriously, why? Is it a gimmick or is it motivated?”

Should I add my voice-over to my film? Peter Biella: “If you have to ask, you can’t afford it.” Lorenzo Ferrarini: “There is no absolute rule, however I can give some principles. In general voiceover works best when it is framed inside an organic concept, as opposed to being a way to solve practical problems (gaps in the narrative, lack of information or footage).There is a whole repertoire of voiceover registers available to use that goes beyond the classic voiceof-god (personal, ironic, polemic, essayistic), and each project should look for appropriate devices. Ethnographic film should not be married to a specific format, in my opinion.” Molly Merryman: “It depends. Sometimes my films need a bit more explanation. If that is the case, I get one of the subjects to describe in their own way what is needed. I don’t script VO.” Phillip Vannini: “It depends on the project. If you do, don’t just add your voice. Most of us don’t have the voice that it takes. I can’t even tell you how many documentaries I’ve stopped watching because the voiceover was either annoying or hard to follow.” Mark Westmoreland: “Best if motivated by personal dimension. The essay film has a lot of potential in anthropology (cf. Matthijs van der Port’s work).”

What distributor would you recommend? Peter Biella: “Bullfrog Films, Documentary Educational Resources (DER), Women Make Movies, First Run/Icarus, RAI, New Day.” Harjant Gill: “New Day Films.” Mark Westmoreland: “DER for their dedication to ethnographic film preservation and dissemination, but there are many options depending on the market.”

What are your preferred VOD and SVOD platforms to work with? Peter Biella: “My distributor does this for me.”

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Lorenzo Ferrarini: “I have used VHX.tv and liked their platform for transactional sales, however lately it has been acquired by Vimeo who have been focusing more on subscription-based content, which is not something that works for me. I am still looking around for an affordable and easy to use VOD platform.” Phillip Vannini: “While Vimeo on Demand is great for DIY productions, nothing compares with working with a distributor that can get your work out on iTunes,Amazon, GooglePlay, and Kanopy.The latter is especially ideal for most of us, as we want universities to be able to access our work easily.They are also very kind to the people they work with.” Mark Westmoreland: “DAFilms, NAFA, Alexander Street Press Ethnographic Video volumes 1–4.Vimeo.”

Have you ever adapted your film for TV broadcasting? What was that like? Carlo Cubero: “It was a very positive experience. I worked with producers that were interested in my approach and I was interested in theirs. I guess that as long as you have clarity as to what you want from the relationship with your collaborator—commercial or otherwise—you’ll do fine.” Harjant Gill: “Yes! The process requires that you follow a specific format and structure stipulated by the TV channel. Sometimes that entails re-editing the film to fit the time frame necessitated by the TV channel. Most TV channels will expect your film to be accompanied with close-captions.” Molly Merryman: “I have aired on regional PBS. Loved the experience—they didn’t limit my content and provided post production support as well as marketing support. But they no longer support independent filmmakers, and so far I have found that other avenues into broadcast want to dictate content. I am a scholarly filmmaker, and I would rather have my films streaming than to have someone external to the film’s community and me decide how the film should be edited.” Phillip Vannini: “The most important thing is to keep in mind a few simple issues like timing and pacing. It can actually be a fun challenge to do a TV cut; it allows you to give your film a whole new identity.”

References Biella, P. (2009).Visual anthropology in a time of war: Intimacy and interactivity in ethnographic media. In P. Strong & J.Wilder (Eds.), Viewpoints:Visual anthropologists at work (pp. 141–181).Austin,TX: University of Texas Press. Office for Human Research Protection. (2018). Scholarly and journalistic activities deemed not to be research. Retrieved from https://www.hhs.gov/ohrp/regulations-and-policy/requests-for-comments/ draft-guidance-scholarly-and-journalistic-activities-deemed-not-to-be-research/index.html Society for Visual Anthropology. (2015). AAA guidelines for the evaluation of ethnographic visual media. Retrieved from https://www.americananthro.org/ConnectWithAAA/Content.aspx?ItemNumber= 1941

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31 CONCLUSION The world according to Rouch Paul Stoller

It is 8:30 am and I am sitting in the Bal Bullier, a historic café on the Boulevard Montparnasse in Paris’s fourteenth arrondissement. I’ve made an appointment with Jean Rouch to interview him about his early research and filmmaking in the Republic of Niger.When I arrive, Rouch, of course, is not there. He’s always late. He likes to say to people “je suis ponctuellement en retard,” which translates roughly to:“I am punctually late,” a curious and ironic statement. Knowing that Rouch is “punctually late,” I’ve brought reading material, an ethnography, and a mystery novel, to pass the time until his arrival.To my great surprise, Jean Rouch shows up at 8:45. “Jean,” I said.“You are so early.” “I wanted to get a good start on your topic, Paul. I like talking about my time in Wanzerbe.” (A famous village of Songhay sorcerers). Rouch insists on ordering two large bowls of café au lait and a basket of croissants, which, he insists, are the best croissants in Paris. “If we are to talk about serious matters—like filming Songhay sorcerers in Wanzerbe, Niger in 1947, we must have good coffee and good croissants.” As we begin to eat, I notice a woman, who is carrying what looks like a bound manuscript. She approaches our table. “Monsieur Rouch?” she asks. “Oui?” “We have an appointment for 8:30. I’ve come all the way from Martinique to see you about my manuscript.” Rouch slaps his forehead, looks at me and shrugs his shoulders.“I forgot, Paul. She’s come all way from Martinique. I have to go, but I’ll be back. Order more coffee and croissants.” I sipped a fresh bowl of café au lait and continued to eat the buttery croissants. I dove into my mystery novel. One hour later, Rouch returned to the table. He ordered more coffee and croissants.As we prepared to talk about his early films in Niger, a tall gentleman approached. He, too, carried a bound manuscript. “Monsieur Rouch?” “Oui?” “We have an appointment for 10:00 am. I’ve come from Germany for my thesis defense.You are on my jury.” He paused.“The defense is Friday.” Jean Rouch slapped his forehead again.“Bon Dieu! Paul,” he said as he smiled at me.“I forgot. His defense is in two days. I have to meet with him. I’ll be back.” 348

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Rouch returned at lunch time and sat down. “Lunch?” he asked. “Let’s get some white wine spritzers and the veal here is excellent.” At lunch we sipped, ate, and bantered about the Songhay people, our mutual friends in Niger, and the state of French anthropology. “It’s time to talk,” he said. “Take out your tape-recorder.” Thus, began fabulous conversation about Wanzerbe, the fabled village of Songhay sorcerers, the film Les Magiciens de Wanzerbe (1947) the great sorcerer Mosi Bana, and the legendary filmmakers Jean Cocteau, Jean Renoir, Jean Luc Godard, and Francois Truffaut. Time slipped way. When I glanced outside, it was beginning to get dark outside. “Dinner?” “This has been terrific Jean, but I can’t.” “Neither can I. I’ve already missed many appointments. But today was a good day, was it not?” It was a memorable day. I recorded material that would eventually appear in my book on Jean Rouch, The Cinematic Griot. But I also learned something important about Jean Rouch’s approach to the world. For Rouch, anthropologists and filmmakers need to be fully engaged in the moment. The rationale of such full engagement, as I later learned, comes from the Songhay notion about patience. If you are fully engaged and patient, the Songhay Elders like to say, your path will open (Stoller, 1993).

Rule #1: Be fully engaged in the moment The task of composing a concluding essay to a vast and varied handbook of visual anthropology is a formidable one. How can any writer, including this anthropologist, summarize and comment sufficiently upon 30 original, profound, and highly diverse contributions that underscore every aspect of visual representation? In this handbook there are essays on the art and science of ethnographic film and video, filmmaking methodologies, documentary film genres and styles, the intersubjective aspects of filmmaking, and film editing and collaboration. More specifically contributors discuss with precision and depth Indigenous community development, film festivals, filming with drones, filming landscapes, documentary hybrids, dimensions of sound, interactive documentaries, collaborative post-production, observational cinema, filming the Other, aesthetics, and multi-modality. Rather than provide superficial commentary on these insightful essays, I prefer to present my take on Jean Rouch’s vision of the visual and its place in anthropology, the academy, and the public sphere. Such a tack, I believe, provides a framework for assessing the current and future importance of visual anthropology. The celebrated work of Jean Rouch needs no introduction here. His great body of work has been seen, savored, and debated for more than 70 years. Scores of books have been written about Rouch in which scholars have discussed his use of the camera, his way of editing, which he called “fixing” the truth, his experience of cine-transe, and his method of shared anthropology (see Feld and Rouch 2003; Henley, 2010 among many others). Rouch’s films and his practices have had a profound impact on the history of visual anthropology. My intention, though, is not to survey a well-known and thoroughly discussed body of work; rather I intend to describe how the wisdom of the Songhay people profoundly shaped Rouch’s approach to anthropology and to the world and how that approach can shape future work in visual anthropology.

*** I am drinking coffee in the dusty courtyard of the University of Niamey’s Institute of Social Research. It is late December and I’ve just arrived from the United States to continue field research on Songhay spirit possession. A smiling Jean Rouch arrives and takes a seat across from me. 349

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“Paul, what are you doing today?” I told him about my plans to visit several officials in order to finalize my research plans. “They can wait, no?” I shrugged. “Drop your plans and come with me to ‘haro banda,’ beyond the water, or the Songhay way of saying the west bank of the River Niger. I want you to see something over there.” By this time I knew that if Rouch asked you to go somewhere with him, it was always worth the effort of rearranging appointments or other activities. So, we squeezed into his battered Citroen Deux Chevaux, crossed the John F. Kennedy bridge, and followed a circuitous network of dusty tracks into the heart of the haro banda neighborhood across the river from Niamey. “You have to see this,” Rouch said to me as we drove up to a thatched canopy, under which we found a calabash drummer and a monochord violinist, the principal instrumentalists in a spirit possession orchestra. Rouch bantered with the musicians and then giggled. They had apparently set up their instruments—and their ritual—just opposite the villa of the rector of the Islamic University of Niamey—all to invoke the power of non-Islamic Songhay spirits in the face of a “foreign” force—Islam.“Quite an act of political resistance, wouldn’t you say?” But our adventure was just beginning. Rouch told me to get into the car for another haro banda excursion. “Where are you going?” I asked. “You’ll see. ” We zigzagged along dusty paths until we parked in the courtyard of the Jane Rouch clinic, the domicile of one Damoure Zika, a nurse who had been Rouch’s collaborator for more than 40 years. As Lam Ibrahim, Mouzourane, and Tallou, the other members of Rouch’s gang, DELAROUTA, emerged, so began the merriment.They told stories that made us laugh so hard that we fell down. “Ah,” Damoure said, “this Whiteman” referring to me, “has learned to laugh with his body. It is through laughter, good feeling and trust,” he stated “that we make our films.That’s the way it’s done.” So, by following my path, no matter the circumstance, I stumbled upon the importance of humor and trust in anthropological fieldwork and film work, which lead me to the second rule in the world according to Rouch:

Rule #2: Have confidence in your path and see where it and your imagination will take you This rule helped me to discover something new and wonderful in my work among West African street traders in New York City. One day Sidi Harouna, an African art trader, who looked like he was in his 60s, sat next to me and my friends at the Malcolm Shabazz Harlem market. We got to talking and I soon discovered he was from Belayara a town 100 kilometers northeast of Niger’s capital, Niamey, and the site of a great market. He was tall, dressed in a black shirt and black trousers. His face was square, his eyes cloudy, and his smile wide and broad. “What are you doing here Paul?” he asked. “I’m doing my work here with my friends.” He slapped his leg and laughed.“You are wasting your time here.” My body stiffened with surprise. “If you want to see a real market, come with me to Le Magasin (The Warehouse) ” “Le Magasin?” “Let’s go. Drop what you are doing and come with me.” 350

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Following Rule #2 in the world according to Rouch, I dropped what I had been doing and followed this amiable stranger to Le Magasin, a seven-story warehouse packed with African Art and African Art traders—a place filled with wonder. In so doing, I stepped right into the next phase of my New York City fieldwork among West African traders in New York City. Surrounded by haunting statuettes, hand-woven blankets, camel saddles, a varied assortment of tools and ornamental weapons, a new world of possibility presented itself. Following an uncertain path into the unknown led to a felicitous end. During the filming of Tooru et Bitti, (1972) an astoundingly wonderful one-take film of spirit possession in Simiri, Niger, Rouch said that he had followed an uncertain path into the compound where dancing mediums had been struggling to attract spirits to their bodies. Putting his other project aside he “let it roll,” and filmed an extraordinary episode of spirit possession that inspired his notion of cine-transe.

Rule #3: Open your ears and listen deeply to the Elders The first two rules in the world according to Rouch are rather practical.These rules underscore the mindfulness of one’s presence in the field as well as the felicitous risk of seizing an opportunity—to interview or to film—and following that opportunity to wherever it leads. Rouch’s third rule is more philosophical. In Songhay epistemology the young mind is undeveloped and not ready to take in truly powerful and potentially dangerous knowledge.Young apprentices must listen to their masters and watch them as they fish, weave, smith, play music, or mix healing potions. Opening your ears means more than hearing what is said; it refers to the practice of deep listening, which is, in essence, listening to hear what someone is saying. In practice, listening to a story entails attending to the “interconnection” of the senses, no less than experiencing the “interconnections” between storyteller and audience (Finnegan, 2014). Put another way, story-telling is at once a social activity and “sense-making activity” (Vannini et al., 2012), which calls for sense-work. Stories are (potentially) addressed to all the senses, even taste (e.g., savoring the “sweetness” of a tale), not just the ears, particularly in the context of face-to-face story-telling (see Boswell, 2017; Stoller, 2019). It takes a long time to learn from the Elders what is essential, what is important, and what is powerful. With the Elders serving as guides, one plunges into the classical knowledge of weaving, smithing, fishing, herbal medicine, sorcery, ethnography, and ethnographic film. In this way, one slowly builds a foundation, from which he or she can, through many trials and errors, gradually refine a set of practices. Eventually, apprentices begin to practice what they have learned, and yet, their minds have not ripened enough to receive truly powerful knowledge.Through experiences of love and loss, one day they are ready to receive from their masters the most important knowledge.Then and only then are they ready to practice their craft or science.Then and only then are they ready to fulfill their greatest obligation: to pass on their knowledge to the next generation of weavers, smiths, fishermen, herbalists, sorcerers, ethnographers, and ethnographic filmmakers. Rouch learned from Elder sorcerers in Niger and from the Elders of the European film world. Through trial and error, he honed his filmmaking skills and demonstrated, following the Songhay way, a good measure artistic playfulness and philosophic flexibility. As an Elder he mentored a whole cadre of ethnographic filmmakers in West Africa, Europe, and the United States—passing on his knowledge and practice to the next generation, all of which follows the principles of Songhay epistemology.

Rule #4: Open yourself to the world and let it enter your being The fourth rule in the world according to Rouch is profoundly existential. It requires an acceptance of vulnerability. Such vulnerability establishes and deepens human connection, which, 351

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in turn, enables the ethnographer or ethnographic filmmaker to experience social life more broadly and more meaningfully—to see and understand things that would be otherwise invisible or incomprehensible.As the great Swiss artist Paul Klee wrote in his famous Notebooks In a forest I have felt many times over that it was not I who looked at the forest. Some days I felt that the trees were looking at me. I was there, listening. I think that the painter must be penetrated by the universe and not penetrate it. I expect to be inwardly submerged, buried. Perhaps I paint to break out. (Charbonner, 1959, cited by Merleau-Ponty 1964, p. 31.) From the earliest moments of Rouch’s tenure in the Songhay world, he opened his being to the world of Songhay spirits and magic, following a path into a wondrous world that shaped his ethnographic and filmmaking practices.As a civil engineer in the Niger Colony, Rouch directed road building projects. During one such project, one of Rouch’s men was struck and killed by lightning after which his men refused to work. They said that the Dongo, mercurial deity of thunder, had killed the man. They said that the spirit had to be appeased. Rouch’s foreman, Damoure Zika, who would become his erstwhile collaborator, said his grandmother, Kalia, a spirit possession priestess of great renown could “fix” the situation. Rouch agreed to this course of spiritual treatment. One day later the diminutive Kalia staged a spirit possession ceremony, the first one Rouch had witnessed. From that moment on Rouch followed the path of the spirits, a path he would follow for the rest of his long life. Rouch understood that if he wanted to film spirit possession ceremonies, which are the subjects of many, if not most of his films, he would have to win the assent of the spirits. He realized that he had to demonstrate his respect for them. In time, the spirits came to know Rouch and would and ask him to do things. Rouch told me that he regularly made sacrifices to Harakoy Dikko, goddess of the River Niger. He routinely sacrificed black goats to the aforementioned Dongo. Rouch had more subtle ways of demonstrating his fidelity and respect for Songhay spirits. He liked to wear baby blue socks and light blue shirts.These may have been his color of choice, and that tint of blue matched the color of his eyes, but that color also represented the spirit Nyalia, a cold spirit in the Songhay pantheon. Rouch’s comportment, he suggested to me, gave him access to the deep recesses of Songhay and Dogon spirituality, which enabled him to film ceremonies of great power and majesty. As in Rouch’s case, my respect for the Songhay spirit world gave me access to a wide range of ceremonies. During one ceremony of the Hauka spirits, the very spirits that Rouch featured in his classic film Les Maitres Fous (1955), two Hauka in the bodies of their mediums ordered me to buy a box of sugar that contained 250 cubes.They told me to give 247 sugar cubes to village children and save three cubes for my return home on the bene hi (boat of the sky). “When the airplane took off,” they said,“throw the cubes over your right shoulder. If you do so, they said,“your work, like the airplane, would rise to the skies.” At the right moment, I threw the sugar cubes over my right shoulder.

Rule #5: Learn how to tell a good story In many respects, the first four rules cast a solid foundation for learning how to tell a good story, which, for Rouch and for me, is the most powerful representation of the ethnographic. On many occasions I had the privilege of sitting in on screenings in Jean Rouch’s projection room, just above his cluttered offices on the second floor of the Musee de L’Homme in Paris.When 352

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young filmmakers arranged to show Rouch their unfinished films, he would routinely invite a motley assortment of people—scholars, other filmmakers, an occasional patron of the museum, and one or two students—to comment on the film-in-progress. “But I don’t know anything about film,” one of the invitees once said. “That’s good,” Rouch replied. “It doesn’t matter.” After the projection, Rouch, who always sat in the front row, turned around, faced his invitees, and asked for commentary. We soon heard animated discussion about film technicalities, sound quality, editing techniques, and post-production problems.The person who had who had proclaimed her ignorance of film found the film “uninspiring.” Rouch then began to ask questions that I had heard before. “Where is the story in this film?” “How can you fix the story?” “What can you do so that the film connects with the audience?” In the world according to Rouch, story is prior to theory. That is not to say that theories are not useful and important. They are. It is to say that in the world of science, theories—given the instabilities of scientific truths—have short shelf lives. Here is a very partial list of “classic” and “not so classic” anthropological theories that burned brightly at first, dimmed, and eventually faded away into the academic sunset: functionalism, structuralism, post-structuralism, ethno-science, ethnographic semantics, cultural materialism, the postmodern turn, the ontological turn, and post-humanism. In the wake of these erstwhile theories, though, we always come back to the story, the foundation of the ethnographic record, which is our gift to the world. The narratives that comprise the ethnographic record are texts and films that can, if they are well crafted, remain open to the world. As Jean Rouch well knew, stories create a bond between the filmmaker and the audience or the author and her or his readers. Through the power of evocation, stories can move us to think new thoughts, construct new realities, and feel new feelings (see Bruner, 1991). Story—sacred and profane—is perhaps the main cohering force in human life. A society is composed of fractious people with different personalities, goals, and agendas. What connects us beyond our kinship ties? Story […] Story is the counterforce to social disorder, the tendency of things to fall apart. Story is the center without which the rest cannot hold. (Gottschall, 2013, p. 138) Indeed, stories are windows through which we encounter the human condition. They demonstrate how we are all connected. That is the power of the story. That is the power of Jean Rouch’s work. So how do you learn to craft a good story? Why are some films and/or ethnographic texts more memorable than others? You could say that memorable ethnographic films and texts are the ones the imagery of which compels an audience to sense the drama of social life. Stories that poetically showcase the lived and un-lived environment, that feature idiosyncratic dialogue and the humor of the absurdities of social life, that underscore the vulnerabilities of character have the capacity to create connections between authors and audiences. They have the capacity to remain “open to the world.”

*** Kumba hinka ga charotarey numey. “It takes two hands to nourish a friendship.” 353

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The sensuous evocation of space, dialogue, humor, and character present a necessary but not a sufficient condition for crafting a good story. Indeed, the world according to Rouch is less about technique and artistry and more about how to you conduct your research, about how you live your life. Do you live in the moment? Do you have confidence on your path? Do you “open your ears” and listen to the Elders? Are you willing to enter the stressful arena of representational vulnerability? In the world according to Rouch, these practices implicate ethnographers among their others and enable them to tell a good story. For Rouch and for me, the depth, texture, and staying power of an ethnographic film or ethnographic text devolves directly from the depth of the relationships that the ethnographer has developed. No matter the sophistication of technical practice or philosophical nuance this deceptively simple principle sets the foundation for present and future visual ethnography. It takes two hands to nourish a friendship.

References Boswell, R. (2017). Sensuous stories in the Indian Ocean Islands. The Senses and Society, 12(2), 193–208. Bruner, J. (1991).The narrative construction of reality. Critical Inquiry, 18(1), 1–21. Charbonner, G. (1959). Le monlogue du peintre. Paris: Julliard. Feld, S., & Rouch, J. (2003). Cine-ethnography. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Finnegan, R. (2014). Communicating: Multi-modes of human interconnection. London: Routledge. Gottschall, J. (2013). The storytelling animal. New York, NY: Houghton-Mifflin. Henley, P. (2010). The adventure of the real: Jean Rouch and the craft of ethnographic cinema. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964). L’Oeil et l’esprit. Paris: Gallimard.9. Rouch, J. 1947. Les Magiciens de Wanzerbe. Paris: CNRS. Rouch, J. (1955). Les maitres fous. Paris: Films de la Pleiade. Rouch, J. (1972). Les tambours d’avant:Tourou et Bitti. Paris: CNRS. Stoller, P. (1993). The cinematic Griot:The ethnography of Jean Rouch. Chicago, IL:The University of Chicago Press. Stoller, P. (2019). Deep listening in the culture of speed. Psychology Today, June 16. Vannini, D.,Waskul, D., & Gottschalk, S. (2012). The senses in self, society and culture:The sociology of the senses. London: Routledge.

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INDEX

Abbott, Sarah 230, 302, 305–6, 311 academic: conferences 290, 297, 310, 315; supervisor 302–4 acoustemology 154, 159–60, 162; see also ethnomusicology; sound activism: environmental 236, 248–50; in ethnocinema 188, 297; media and digital 143, 148, 248–50, 252–3, 269; youth 78 The Act of Killing 167–8, 170, 289 Adobe: After Effects 65, 275, 344; Photoshop 65, 275, 344; Premiere 156, 343, 344; Bridge 344; see also editing aesthetics of accountability 22–3, 52, 55 Afflictions 110–11, 113 Alexander Street Press 290, 347; see also Subscription Video on Demand (SVOD);Video on Demand (VOD) Amazon 9, 291, 247; and Prime 282, 290; see also Subscription Video on Demand (SVOD);Video on Demand (VOD) American Anthropological Association (AAA) 21, 71, 127, 131, 156, 196, 314, 331 analog media 55, 137 anthropocentric 224, 226–7 anthropological and documentary dilemma 22, 42 anthropological cinema 294, 313–14, 316–21 anthropological knowledge 20, 31, 51, 261; see also thick description; thin description anthropological metaphysic 17–18, 21, 24 anthropology: aural 77; contemporary 13–14, 30; cultural 73, 188, 225; design anthropology 77–8; digital 267–8; reflective 19; shared 207, 220–1; spheres of 31–2; visual psychological and psychological 108, 111, 113 Apple 65, 140, 147–8, 344; see also machines Apple Final Cut Pro 65, 156, 344; see also editing art probing 14, 61–2, 65–8, 70

Asch, Timothy 26, 107, 129, 138, 297 As Long as There’s Breath 40, 46 ASTRA Film Festival 319–18, 345; see also film festivals attribute dimension grid 15, 16 augmented reality (AR) 67, 103, 145, 147, 291; see also virtual reality (VR) avant-garde 19, 47, 53, 165 aviation media 249, 252 The Ax Fight 138–9, 297 Bandersnatch 98–9 Barbash, Ilisa 5, 34, 174 Bateson, Gregory 75, 107, 126, 128–9, 259 Beeld voor Beeld Festival 318–19; see also film festivals Biella, Peter see Maasai Interactive blend modes 61, 65–8, 230 Bonnetta, Joshua 53–5 Boriello, Maurizio 30, 35, 37–8 Boudreault-Fournier, Alexandrine see Guardians of the Night Brault, Philippe 99 broadcasting 282–3, 325–6, 347 Broken Ground 263–5 b-roll 54, 112, 177 budget see funding camcorders 117–18, 333 cameras 332–3; 4K 209, 235, 253, 337, 344; 16mm 53–4, 171; 35mm 50, 166; and digital single lens-reflex (DSLR) 5, 156, 240, 329, 333; see also filters; lenses; tripods Canon 9, 332–3 Chalcraft, Jasper 193–4 Changnon, Napoleon 129, 297 “Christmas videos” 120, 122

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Index Chronicle of a Summer 111, 155, 165 cine-ethnography 184, 187 Cinema du Réel 316; see also film festivals cinéma vérité 154, 165 Cizek, Katerina 99 Close to Nature 62–6 co-aesthetic 49–50, 52 collaborative filmmaking 165, 203, 215–16, 219–21 colonialism 22, 43, 221, 225; see also imperialism comics see drawing Comité du Film Ethnographique 315, 322 consent 196, 200, 206, 210–12, 283–4; see also release Coover, Roderick 140 Coppola, Francis Ford 67, 132 counter-mapping 250–1; see also drawings crew 336 cultural insider 199–200 cultural representation 41, 45, 185, 215; see also Eurocentric; exoticism Culture shack 188–9 Cultures in Webs: Hypermedia and the Documentary Image 140–1, 145

ethnographic machinimas 268, 270–1, 273 ethnographic monograph 31, 47, 74, 168 ethnographicness 15, 294, 296 ethnographic surrealism 68, 165, 218, 326 Ethnographic Terminalia 21, 72, 156 ethnography: auto 147, 289; immersive 256–8; psychedelic 35 ethnology 61, 66, 156, 296–7, 317 Ethnomethodological Conversation Analysis (EMCA) 83, 88–9 ethnomethodology 81, 83–4, 87 ethnomusicology 76–7, 159; see also acoustemology; sound Eurocentric 74, 206–8; see also cultural representation; exoticism Even Asteroids Are Not Alone 271–3 EVE Online 271–2 exoticism see cultural representation; Eurocentic Expect Delays 307, 310 extensions for filming 329–30

Dead Birds 247–8 Deger, Jennifer 30, 35, 37–8, 56, 58 Diamanti, Eleonora 154, 158 diaspora 282, 289, 293 distribution 281–3, 289–91, 345 documentary 7, 14; and collaborative 22, 239–40; ethnographic desktop documentary 268–9, 273; modes of 26–7; relational 52, 59; see also Documentary Educational Resources (DER) Documentary Educational Resources (DER) 290, 297–8, 346; see also documentary Doordarshan 282–3; see also broadcasting drawings 72–4; see also counter-mapping Dufresne, David 99 DVD 71, 279 editing: assistance 344–5; software 344 El Mar La Mar 53, 178, 180 embodied directives see shepherding essay film 167, 205, 320, 346 ethnofiction 24, 27, 165, 169, 217 Ethnografilm 127, 288, 295; see also film festivals ethnographic experimentation: aesthetic 52, 59; conceptual 52; formal 21, 52–5, 58–9; metacinematic 166; see also sensory ethnography ethnographic fieldwork: as participant observation 33; in reflexivity 155; in video recordings 87; in virtual worlds 271, 275; in visual representation 32 ethnographic film: debates in 294–6; experimental 19, 27, 30, 32, 35, 36–8, 67, 159; frames of 17–23; see also cinema vérité; observational cinema; sensory ethnography; sensory vérité

Facebook 4, 75, 148, 185, 257, 296; see also social media family of resemblances 23–4, 26–7 Farnell, Brenda 138, 145 Faye, Safi 295 Feld, Steven 76–7, 154, 159–60 feminist and queer theory 127; see also postcolonial critiques and perspectives Ferrarini, Lorenzo 129 F for Fake 167, 170 film festivals 8, 26–7, 127–8, 165, 280–1, 286–90, 295–6; see also academic conferences filters 335; see also cameras Fish, Adam see Points of Presence Flaherty, Robert 126, 164–5, 215, 341, 345 Forest of Bliss 155, 297 Fort McMoney 99–100 Frameline 128, 282–3, 289–90 Freytag’s pyramid 97–8 Friedman, P. Kerim 13, 108 funding: for film festivals 319; for research 307–8, 328–9 gamification 98–9 Gardner, Robert 107, 155, 247, 321 gaze: colonial 295; ethnographic 120–1; GoPro 241; of The Other 226; research and academic 119, 128, 260–2, 295; tourist 258 gender inequality 127, 133; see also feminist and queer theory; sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) Ghosh, Shohini 129–30 Gill, Harjant 71, 130, 133, 279, 293, 299–300 Goddinho, Leandro 269 Google 9, 145–7, 257, 261, 285, 347 GoPro 50, 185, 251, 261–2, 264, 268, 333

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Index Göttingen International Ethnographic Film Festival (GIEFF) 295, 318–19; see also film festivals Gough-Brady, Catherine see Expect Delays; River Crisis Granada Center of Visual Anthropology at Manchester 21, 342 grants see funding Guardians of the Night 158–61 Harris, Anne see Culture shack Herzog, Werner 167–8 high-definition (HD) 4, 117, 248, 250, 253, 283, 333 Highrise 99, 103 Hikiji, Rose 193–4 Homefront Heroines:The WAVES of World War II 97–8 host communities 195, 197–9 HTML 100, 145, 147; see also editing iconophobia 20, 31, 33, 205; see also logocentrism illustrations see drawings Imorana, Zakari 263–4 imperialism: cultural 196–7; visual 196; see also colonialism Indigenous: drone activism 250–1; knowledge systems and cultures 199, 201, 225; media and filmmakers 23–24, 43, 300; portrayal and misrepresentation of 74, 202, 270; see also Karrabing Indigenous Corporation; Miyarrka Media; natureculture InqScribe 342, 344; see also editing Instagram 4, 75, 100, 185, 269, 275; see also social media Institutional Review Board (IRB) 96, 193, 210, 305, 331; see also research ethics interactive technology 98, 143, 187 International Visual Sociology Association 127, 131 interviews: in observational cinema and sensory ethnography 33, 174; in oral history 96–100; in person-centred ethnography (PCE) 108–10; in virtual worlds 271; see also scripts; subjects Intimate Distance 273–4 iPad 235, 333 Iron Ministries 178, 180 Isuma.tv 300 Kanopy 4, 9, 136, 279, 290–1, 347; see also Subscription Video on Demand (SVOD);Video on Demand (VOD) Karrabing Indigenous Corporation 43, 298–300; see also Indigenous Kasic, Kathy 177, 180–1 Köhn, Steffen see Intimate Distance layering see blend modes Lee, Kevin B. 268

legalities 283–4, 291 Lemelson, Robert 82, 140 lenses 264–5, 333; see also cameras; filters Les Maitres Fous 36, 352 Les Regardes Comparés 316 Leviathan 24, 34–5, 158, 174–5 LGBTQ see sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) lighting 116, 339; and sensitivity (ISO) 230 live cinema 61, 66–8, 319 lived experience 20, 33–4, 37, 108–9, 115 locations: filming 336, self-preparation 337–8 logging footage 341–2 logocentrism 20, 31, 85, 280, 294; see also iconophobia Loose horses 177, 180–1 Luning, Sabine 261, 263 Maailma Film Festival 318; see also film festivals Maasai Interactive 138, 140, 145, 147 MacBook Pro see machines MacDougall, David 17, 19–20, 24–5, 31, 44–5, 155, 175–6, 178, 196, 202, 294 Macfarlan, Alan 138, 145, 147 machines 344 Magnússon, Jón Bjarki 271–2 Manakamana 40, 47, 174 Mardistan/Macholand 130, 282, 285 Margaret Mead Film Festival 126, 288, 295, 345; see also film festivals The Maribor Uprisings 143–5 Marshall, John 26, 106–7, 155 Mason, Jennifer 120, 122 massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) 145–7, 270–1; see also online gaming meaning-making 83–5, 89, 92, 112 Mermaids, or Aiden in Wonderland 43–4, 46 metacinema 166 microphones 58, 64, 229; and avoidance of using 117; recommendations 334 A Migrant’s Tale 168–9 Milind Soman Made Me Gay 282–3, 289–90 Minh-ha, Trinh T. 26, 156, 209, 216, 218–19, 221 The Mirror 166–7 Mission Movie 289, 299–300 Miyarrka Media 35, 55–7 mobile phones 56, 107, 118, 267, 308 montage 65; spatial 268; and spherical 260–3 more-than-representational theory 14, 136, 183, 187, 242 Mortimer, Roz 178–9, 181 Mountain 228 Muir, Stewart 117, 120, 122 multidimensional approach see spider chart multimodal interaction analysis 83, 89, 92; see also transmedia

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Index production companies see broadcasting Project 4:21 116, 119 promotion see publicity PSBT (Public Service Broadcasting Trust) 282–3; see also broadcasting publicity 284–5

Musée de l’Homme 165, 316, 318, 352 Museum of Ethnography 67–8 Nanook of the North 126, 164, 209, 215 narration 81, 95–6, 174, 220–1; and god-like 104, 155, 165, 215, 221, 228–9, 346; see also voiceover nature culture 225, 230 Netflix 4, 98; see also Subscription Video on Demand (SVOD);Video on Demand (VOD) new media 16, 103, 146, 237, 291, 299 noise 61–6, 68–9, 157, 244; and floor 63 nonhumans 224, 240 non-representational theory (NRT) see more-than-representational Nordic Anthropological Film Association’s Film Festival (NAFA) 318, 347; see also film festivals objectivity 111, 155, 170, 191, 209–10; and aesthetics of 218; see also shared anthropology observational cinema 30–7, 157; and with nonhumans 227 online gaming 100, 269–73; see also massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG); virtual reality (VR) ontological turn 21, 24, 272, 353 Oppenheimer, Joshua 167–8 The Other 42, 184, 186, 206; and filming 315, 349; see also gaze; nonhumans Panahi, Jafar 166–7 parallax effect 23–4, 31, 38, 293 Paravel,Véréna 158, 174 participant imagining 35, 37–8 participatory research methodology 147, 185, 207 Pauwelussen, Annet 261–2 PBS 325–6, 347; see also broadcasting Peedom, Jennifer 228–9 performance 68, 167–9, 219–22 Performing the Digital 297; see also academic conferences permissions see releases person-centered ethnography (PCE) 108–10; see also visual psychological and psychological anthropology photography 16, 73–5, 230 Pin Up! The Movie 98–9 poetic filmmaking 170, 227, 269 Points of Presence 248, 252–5 Polley, Sarah 166 Positive YouTubers 269, 270 Possible Worlds 66–8 postcolonial critiques and perspectives 14, 15, 41, 309; see also feminist and queer theory post-representation 184–6 Prison Valley 99–100

RacontR 100, 102–3 radar chart see spider chart Razsa, Maple 143, 144 Reassemblage—From the Firelight to the Screen 26, 41, 156, 214, 218, 221 recorders see microphones reductionist see anthropocentric reflexivity 19, 110–11, 226, 238 releases 283–4; see also consent research ethics 304–6; see also Institutional Review Board (IRB) re-takes 339–40 Ringtone 55–6, 58–9 River Crisis 307, 310 Roots of Love 282, 287 Rouch, Jean 26–7, 41, 68, 107, 111, 128, 155, 157–8, 160, 165, 176, 177, 184, 187, 196, 214–23, 293–5, 298, 315–17, 336, 346; and award 27; Rouchian 36 Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI) Film Festival 27, 288, 295, 318, 345–6; see also film festivals royalties 290 Russell, Ben 30, 35–7 Ryan, Kathleen M. see Homefront Heroines:The WAVES of World War II screencasts 267, 271, 274–5 screenings 201, 207, 290, 343–4 scripts 326–7 sensory ethnography 21, 32–34; see also observational cinema; sensory vérité The Sensory Ethnography Lab (SEL) 21, 33, 52, 174 sensory vérité 136, 140; see also cinema vérité Sent Away Boys 282, 286 sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) 127, 131–3 shared authority 96–7 shepherding 89–90 shutter speed 230, 335 signal theory see noise floor Skawennati 270; see also TimeTravellerTM slow pace 55, 136, 174, 179, 231; see also time lapse Sniadecki, J. P. 53–4, 174–5, 178, 180 social media 75–6 Society for Cultural Anthropology 74; see also Society for Visual Anthropology

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Index Society for Visual Anthropology 27, 74, 127, 131, 345; and Film and Media Festival (SVAFMF) 287–9; see also Society for Cultural Anthropology sonic ethnography 21; see also acoustemology; ethnomusicology Sony 117, 332–3 sound: design 176, 181; remixing 77; see also acoustemology; ethnomusicology soundscapes 53, 146–7, 154, 157, 160, 229–30; see also noise soundtrack 112, 154–61, 215, 217–18, 345–6 spider chart 24 Spray, Stephanie 14, 40, 46–7, 174 Staton, David stereotypes 46, 76, 130, 170, 206, 265 Steyerl, Hito 62–3, 184–5 Stories We Tell 166–7, 170 storyboarding 72, 100, 290, 327, 342 subjects 109, 326–7, 341; see also interviews; scripts Subscription Video on Demand (SVOD) 9, 279, 346–7; see also Video on Demand (VOD) Sweetgrass 26, 34, 174 synchronization 216–18; and asynchronization 218–19 Tabuluja (Wake Up!) 214, 219–22 Taiwan International Ethnographic Film Festival (TIEFF) 15, 21, 27, 29, 288; see also film festivals Tajen: Interactive 140, 142, 145 Taylor, Lucien 17, 19–21, 30–4, 158, 174, 197, 205 TeamSpeak 271 Telegut, Alis 30, 35–7 thick: depiction 33, 42, 46; description 30, 31–2, 37, 46, 158, 211, 284; dialogue 96; see also thin description thin description 30, 31–4; see also thick description This Is History (Afterall) 178, 180–1 time lapse 230–1; see also slow pace TimeTravellerTM 270, 273; see also Skawennati transduction 63; see also noise transmedia 14, 55, 71, 78–9; see also multimodal interaction analysis

treatments see script tripods: in comparison to wearable cameras 240, 243, 335–6; debate of use 177, 259; in use 58, 117, 123, 264, 308, 335–6; see also cameras URL 292, 311; see also distribution Velez, Pacho 40 VHS 14, 71, 117, 279, 291 video analysis 84, 90 video essay 268 Video Intervention/Prevention Assessment (VIA project) 116–18, 120–1, 123 Video on Demand (VOD) 9, 279, 346–7; see also Subscription Video on Demand (SVOD) Vimeo 4, 9; see also Subscription Video on Demand (SVOD);Video on Demand (VOD) virtual reality (VR) 73, 103, 145–7, 156–7, 236, 291, 319; see also augmented reality (AR); online gaming voiceover 53, 166, 346: in interviews 176–9; see also narration Walkerdine,Valerie 116, 119, 120–1 Warwuyun 56–7 wearable camera technology (WCT) 238–9; see also GoPro webcam 267, 273–4 Weerasethakul, Apichatpong 296 Welles, Orson 167, 248 Westmoreland, Mark see Broken Ground Wetu, Shambuyi 194, 214, 219 whole bodies, people, interactions and acts 15, 17, 26; see also attribute dimension grid Willim, Robert see Close to Nature; Possible Worlds worldmaking 59, 66, 68 Yanomamö Interactive 129, 138 YouTube 4, 188, 269, 283, 298–9; see also Subscription Video on Demand (SVOD);Video on Demand (VOD) Zoom H4n 158–9, 308; see also microphones

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